skinny cats
Nicole senses the growing distance between herself and her lover Marrast. They’ve become, she thinks, “skinny cats that cross the ceiling in embarrassment…,” rub against each other, and quickly separate, avoiding each other as much as possible until it’s time to go to bed and turn out the light.”1
My father writes that my older brother, just forty-four years old, is having back trouble again. He’s worked at hard manual jobs from the time he was sixteen or seventeen. I think about my own occasionally sore knee, damaged a bit probably from all the soccer and basketball I played while my brother was loading sacks of livestock feed supplement, or building houses.
As I write, here in the Oaxacan sunlight, next to the pool in the backyard of the house we’ve rented during this sabbatical in which I am paid just to think and write, Rosendo and Feliz, the older Mixtec couple that look after the garden and pool, pull weeds from the hedges around the pool, burn trash, and play tag with their little grandson Manuel under the magnificent laurel tree that fills the air above the property like a great green balloon. Rosendo grimaces, I notice looking up from a book, as he yanks on a stubborn weed [Ù52].
I don’t know what he feels. And I don’t even feel able to ask him so weighted by the long, quiet gulf of class that lies between us As though I were shoving along before me a mound of five centuries of privilege accumulated at his expense. Does he resent me? Does he fear me? Does he even give me a second thought? I can only imagine. So I’m left with this sense, shared with Nicole, of he and I becoming those skinny awkward cats, thrown by different worlds up against each other in this one world, not minding it exactly, certainly not hostile to each other, but not used to it either and without a clue as to what to do or say.
1 Julio Cortázar, 62: A Model Kit, Trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Avon, 1973), p. 77. In Spanish: 62: Modelo para armar [1968] (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1996), p.76.her and without a clue as to what to do or say.