Librex Del Amorx

“It’s not quite lunch yet. I’ll just take a cafe con leche,” I said to the cute red-headed waitress. She leaned against the black, twisting, wrought iron rail that wrapped around Il Bistro’s patio. She scrunched up her lips with confusion. “Siento, siento,” I laughed. “I’ve been speaking nothing but Spanish for the last two years. Coffee with milk, please.”

She laughed, and scribbled on her order pad, “I shoulda known. Sugar?”

“No ‘zucar. I like it bitter.” I don’t think I’d seen a red head in just as long. “Oh,” I stopped her before she could bring my order in. “Would you mind telling Amayah that Gabe would like to say ‘hello’ if she has a minute, por favor?”

Her big green eyes got bigger underneath her pink kerchief. “So you’re Gabe.”

Don’t tell anyone this. I fidget with my head when I’m nervous. Fingers in the hair. Tugging on my earlobes. Rubbing my eyes. Tugging and scratching on my beard when it grew in. “Abuelito,” my grandmother would say, “One day you’re going to get so nervous that you’ll make yourself a new face.”

“Maybe I want a new face,” I’d grin at her. Or pout. She struggled with understanding me. That was clear. She also tried very hard to make concessions, like calling me “Abuelito” when “nina” made me scratch a bit too much.

I took a single unwrapped, unlabelled, cigar from my shirt pocket. This was the 90’s. You could still smoke in cafes and bars back then. Even so, cigars asked a pungent, poignant, question of consideration. The habit was new and infrequent. This one cigar could have gotten me in some trouble with customs, but a clever man knows to walk with confidence. I put it in the pocket of another shirt four days ago, fresh from the table it was rolled on, and kept it there along roads, across rivers, and through skies.

On the other side of 27th street, a couple after-after-hours clubgoers stumbled out through the wide doors of Twilo, home of world famous DJ, Junior Vasquez. They were dressed like extras from a post-apocalyptic movie, tossed from a make-shift desert speedster through a neon paint factory. I could hear the gradually surrendering bass drum between the doors’ open and close. “Esa vaina es fea,” I laughed. “Pero esa vaina es bonita”. My voice was finally gravelly enough that I enjoyed hearing it.

That’s how my abuela described New York City. “Esa vaina es fea,” then she’d lock you with her steely grey eyes “pero esa vaina es bonita. Just like me.” She’d wink. Always the right eye. I missed the city almost as much as I missed her. Maybe I’d just chew on that cigar until the nice young lady came out with my cafe con leche.

***

“Take this with you and keep it with you,” My grandmother pressed her engagement ring into my palm’s soft flesh. “And now go. Before I try to stop you.” Like I couldn’t see the tears welling up and threatening her eyes with rust. My thighs felt like they were melting, right around the knees. I walked as fast as I could to commit to leaving. Maybe it was my medicine or maybe it was my mood.

I bought a cheap cross on a chain at Laguardia, threaded Abeulita’s engagement ring, and hung it around my neck. I got on a plane and off a plane and on a smaller plane, off that smaller plane, then on an even smaller plane, then a bus and then another bus. I was afraid I’d go claustrophobic and panic. I passed the cramped up time reading Kerouac and Neruda, tucked away tightly in my rucksack. “I will bring you flowers from the mountains, bluebells, dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses. I want to do with you what spring does with cherry trees.” But what could I bring from the rural jungles of Colombia? Would I even make it that far.

Abuela knew something was up when my passport came in the mail. “Abuelito!” She stomped. “What do you need with a passport? Are you going somewhere?”

“Well you see, grandmother, I’ve recently spent some considerable time in the big library branch by Bryant Park. I’ve decided that it would give my life a lot of meaning if I tracked down my long lost father with the help of the newspaper clipping that you keep hidden in the frame of the family photo that he isn’t in,” wasn’t going to cut it. Instead, I went with “I need a backup ID for work.” That was partially true. Bike messengers get easier access to government and corporate buildings with a passport. Of course, things were different back then. I didn’t tell her how the librarians were nice enough, after some gentle but insistent nagging, to help me find Javier Guerrero, the reporter for La Voz De La Gente who’d interviewed my father and last seen him alive. I had twenty five hundred in small bills hidden away in a roll of socks, stashed in my army surplus rucksack. That amount of cash was probably enough to make a gringo disappear in the hills of rural Colombia. I spent two hundred dollars in long distance calls to the editor’s desk of La Voz before I could convince Javier to help me find my father.

***

I still remember the day that Amayah and I met. Abuelo sat on a bench in the PJ courtyard, watching me ride my tricycle over the top edge of a newspaper’s page. Abuela cooked arroz con pollo five floors above us. My mother cleaned other people’s messes at work. My father built other people’s homes. Abuelo didn’t move a single inch when Amayah crashed her own tricycle into mine. He snuffled half a chortle and continued licking his finger and turning newspaper pages, watching us over the newsprint. Her high pitched, wailing screech of a laugh quickly became one of my favorite sounds. We were immediately inseparable.

Amayah lived with her parents two floors down from “Coco” and Sebastian Perez, my grandparents, in 3C. Grandparents and parents worked out a fluid schedule of before and after school, sleep overs, and weekends. Tricycles soon gave way to jumping ropes and kickballs. Cut out paper dolls became cloth and then plastic. After school, Amayah would pour through my mother’s record collection, switching seamlessly from Julio Iglesias to Carlos Santana to Willie Colon and Hector Lavoe while I braided her hair. “They remind me of you at that age, Christina,” abuelita told my mother one night not long after my ninth birthday.

“Don’t say that,” mama said through her teeth. Amayah was sent home early. My parents and grandparents went from silence to short bursts of argument to silence. My father said nothing at all.

“There’s nothing wrong with it, miha,” my grandmother insisted. “You are who you are and your past is what it is.”

“Mama, why do you even bring it up? It’s like you’re trying to encourage it.”

“I’m going out,” my father put on his black leather jacket and took his keys from the rack.

“It’s a new moon,” my mother said.

“No!” abuelita snapped.

“So, now you are ready to do it,” my grandfather sighed.

“I’m not even sure he’ll stay to see his name on the page, Papa. Our child needs a father and your grandchild’s father needs reassurance. The book worked for you.”

“Fine,” grandmother crossed her arms. “Sebastian, get the book. I’ll mark the calendar.”

My grandfather returned from the Korean war with American citizenship and a strange curiosity. “It was like I was in a trance. A strange old man pushed a book over my heart. It felt like it was telling me that he was giving me exactly what I was looking for. So, I paid him what I had on me” He told the story often. “‘New moon,” he would say in an impressed accent that would probably not be too acceptable these days. “you write you name, left side page. Full moon. You see name of one true love on right side of page. Next to you name. You see!’” Then he would open the book to the page he wrote his own name, Sebastian Perez, on the left with Xocoyotl Delgado beside it.

My mother insisted that Abuelo wrote the name in himself but he and Abuelita would swear that he did not and point out the pages and pages of names in different languages and different hands on the left column, with every name on the right in the same hand, regardless of language.

“This is how I knew your abuela and I were meant to be. I came home from the war and proposed to her the day I got here.”

“And here we are,” Abuela would say as she kissed his forehead.

Mama didn’t want to believe the fairy tail until that one night. She wrote her name, Christina Perez, right beneath Abuelo’s, closed the book and shut the door to the room she shared with papa. My father still smelled of liquor and cigarettes by the time I got up for school. He slept unresponsively on the couch all day.

My parents barely talked for the next 26 days. He would pace. He would leave. They would argue, then he’d pace and leave again. On the 26th day, the last of the lunar cycle, we knew he was not coming back. Abuelo and Abuelita came back from the groceria to find the steamer trunk that Abuelo kept his treasure in smashed open, the book gone.

“Christina, you know whose name is going to be on that page. And you know that’s why he took the book with him. Some things are best left alone, miha. Esa vaina,” my grandmother tutted.

***

Mr. Guerrero stopped his dust coated pickup truck on the bare, muddy road leading into Colombia’s jungle. Trees parted and a handful of men in drab green stepped from the leaves and cane stalks. “Do not be so quick to ask them about the book as you were with me,” he cautioned.

“But I didn’t ask you about the-”

“Verdad, you did,” he explained. “In fact, don’t ask questions at all. Give them whatever they want, do whatever they want, but do not tell them what these are for,” he handed me a full brown pill bottle. He reached across me and opened the passenger side door. I sunk my boots into the mud, stuffed the pill bottle in a pocket, and slung my rucksack over my shoulder. The men lifted cases from the truck’s bed and lashed them to rough sledges that looked like they were made from chopped wooden fences and barn doors, pulled by coarse rope.

“Here you go,” their leader, Guey said and handed me the rope-pull to the sledge he’d dragged behind himself. When the truck bed was empty, Mr. Guerrero banged on the driver’s side door to get my attention.

“Don’t be stupid.” He started the engine and reversed down the narrow mud road.

I marched with the men in olive green for miles. My feet, my shoulders, and my back were in agony. Guey led us into camp as night fell. Another group of men came and took the sledges from us, distributing the cases of supplies to various lean-to’s, tents, and thrown together shacks. My stomach growled so ravenously that I almost didn’t hear Guey’s voice.

“So, you’re ‘Nejito’s son? Decide to come follow in his footsteps?”

I nodded “Yes, sir.”

“You better watch where those footsteps lead you then, conjo. Paul was a good enough guy, but it didn’t keep this thing from swallowing him whole.” he gestured to the jungle behind him.

I nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“You’re here more because of Javi than anything else. Got it?” I nodded again.

“If there’s anything useful in here, the people are welcome to it,” I offered my rucksack to Guey. He opened it and pawed through the contents.

“Look at this. On the Road. I love this book.” A passing comrade took my rucksack from Guey without breaking his stride. The leader stuck my book under his arm. “Alright. Stop nodding like an idiot and go get something to eat with the rest of the guys,” he said and walked away. I stumbled toward the mess, wafting the scent of the freshest arroz con pollo I’d ever inhaled in my life. Not as good as abuela’s, mind you, but something altogether familiar, foreign, and special unto itself.

***

I was sent to a special school in Jr. high, one for students who did not behave according to what was expected of them. We did not see each other at school any longer. So, we would sneak out onto the fire escape late at night, when living rooms were vacant, and whisper our days to one another. Amayah would share half her headphones with me. We would listen to the radio on her cassette player and look at the stars. By high school, we’d grown too large to sneak on the fire escape. Neighbors complained to the super about our late night creakings and thuddings. By the first snowfall of my freshman year, Amayah’s parents moved to another part of the Bronx. It was only a couple stops on the 4 train away, but it felt like another continent.

We snuck phone calls that grew more distant. Distance became the norm. One day, Amayah and I hadn’t spoken in a year. I wrote her letters that I never sent. Abuelita consoled me when I was despondent. My mother did her best, but she started to keep a distance after my father left. Abuelo’s passing was sudden and devastating but like a bomb set off in outer space; no real sound, only loss and destruction. Then adjusting course. At least calls from that strange old antiques dealer, inquiring about the book, stopped. I spent the last two years of my schooling doing little more than going to school, working in a department store stockroom, reading books, and spending time with my grandmother. Six months after graduation, Abuela handed me an invitation to my second cousin Bettina’s Quinceanera. I scoffed at it.

“Why go to a Quinceanera, Abuelita? I barely know any of those people.”

“You barely know any of those people because you’ve locked yourself in here with me, nina… abuelito. You need to get out sometimes. Have some fun for the first night in how long.”

“I have fun at work. I have fun with you.”

“Nobody has fun at work.” She stared me down. “Amayah will be there.”

My stomach erupted with butterflies. I thought I might throw up.

“Gabriel. Go to the party.”

She rarely called me that.

At the party, I said hello to Bettina, delivered her gift, and followed the sounds of Santana flowing into Willie Colon out to the back yard. Amayah was at the DJ table, flipping through records.

“Gab… Gabe… Gabriel,” she sputtered when she saw me. We embraced for the first time in years. I struggled to control my weak legs, salsa dancing stomach, and spinning head. She was pregnant. Very pregnant.

“Gabe is fine, ‘Mayah.”

***

Two years of work flew by in the jungle. Rich people in Manhattan pay hundreds of dollars a month to take hot yoga, spinning, and boot camp style workout classes that I got for simply hopping on a plane, throwing aside all my worldly belongings, and agreeing to work like a dog without end in mind. I chopped wood, built fires without matches, cooked for dozens of people, and mended fences in rural communities. I dragged supplies miles and miles and miles on a sledge made from scrap wood. My hands got tough and calloused. My build became leaner and more muscular. My beard grew in to match the other men in drab. Life in the jungle was not idyllic by far, but the simple needs of survival made it easier to prioritize. The absence of distractions made it easier to focus. Knowing that we could have to move camp at any moment freed me of attachments to frivolity and material things.

I was reclining in my hammock, threading a needle to sew a hole in the knee of a pair of my pants when Moso came running toward my lean to.

“Gabe! Gabe! Gabe! Come with me, quick!” he shouted. “Guey needs you! Quick!” I dropped the sewing project and hopped from my hammock.

I followed Moso to a clearing. Guey was directing men to gather up rope and tie it to a tree to anchor it. He explained that his wife and daughter had come to visit in the morning but the moment he turned his back, his daughter fell down the well.

“I’d do it myself, ‘Buelito, but I’m too damned big! You’re the skinniest one here.”

By the time that claustrophobic impulse hit me for the first time since I got on the plane to Colombia. By the time I identified it though, I was already helping Moso and Guey tie a rough harness around my shoulders, waist, and legs. My time in the jungle made me act quickly instead of moping around. Even if I was terrified.

The pit was dark. Slimy. It smelled worse than anything in the jungle yet. This wasn’t a well like you see on television, with milled stones stacked in a cylindrical shape. It was a long, narrow hole in the ground, surrounded by some rocks, that Guey and his men dropped buckets on rope into until it dried up.

I crawled, upside down and down further into the hole. The rope pulled on my joints and cartilage. I started to wonder if the harness wasn’t tied too tight. How long does it take before permanent damage sets in when circulation gets cut off? I wiggled my toes and kept crawling lower.

“Nina!” I shouted. It didn’t echo like in the movies. It seemed to be sucked in by the earth around me. The deeper I went, the more narrow the tunnel got. I had to extend my arms out in front of me and accept that they were staying that way if I wanted to grab Guey’s daughter when I got to her. I heard no cries. I heard no sobs. I started to fear that venemous snakes and spiders may be anywhere around me.

“Abuelito!” Guey shouted. “Do you see it yet?”

It?

***

Amayah took a bite of half my jamon y queso, the gooey cheese coming away with her lips in strings.

“I’m not holding you up, am I? Should you be getting back to work?”

“No no no! Gabriel! Don’t tease me.” She exclaimed. “What happened? Did you rescue Guey’s daughter?”

“There was no daughter. It was all a trick.” I patted the brown paper package on the table. “There was a book. Guey spent two years testing me and this was my final test. To see if I was capable of self sacrifice enough to take the book from the well he threw it down.” Amayah chewed slowly, pouring over the idea in her head. “I wrote my name in the book 26 days ago.”

“That means that today…”

I nodded. “Si, mami. It does.Go ahead and open it.”

With trembling hands, Amayah De La Cruz opened the first gift I’d been able to successfully deliver to her in years. The string untied, the paper came off, and wrapped in it were two even stacks of one hundred dollar bills. One hundred in each pile. Modest, but just about the size and shape of a small black leatherbound book.

“Gabe, what are you doing? Put this away! Where did you get this?”

“Van Horn. The weirdo antique guy who used to make offers to my grandfather. 20G’s will buy you some nice turntables."

The last of Saturday night’s clubkids stumbled out the doors of Twilo.