Monthly Story (January '23): Evening on the Plaza

fiction

Salta. An item on the bucket list. Flying in from Buenos Aires, he saw it out the window, comfortably snuggled up against the foothills. “It’s in the Lerma Valley,” he’d told his neighbor a week before. They’d been shoveling snow out of their side-by-side driveways, a couple of widowers marking time. In his case, flirting with another heart attack. The snow was wet and heavy.

His neighbor rested his chin on the shovel’s handle and nodded. “Why don’t you just go to Florida like everybody else?” he said. 

He’d answered. “If you want, I can show it to you on a map. It’s almost to Bolivia.”

“No, no,” his neighbor said. “No need for that.”

They both had their reasons.

But now, there it was, right out the window. Wispy clouds on green foothills, the dry high country rising behind them, and behind that the snow.

He wondered what the hell he was doing there anyway. 

At the hotel, he opened his suitcase on the bed and transferred underwear, socks, and T-shirts to the dresser drawers. Then he set his medicines, seven bottles and a pill cutter, on the bedside table. Razor, peppermint toothpaste, shaving cream, and dental floss he assigned places on the bathroom sink. He unfolded his extra shirts and pants and hung them on hangers in the closet, then set himself down with his Lonely Planet and the city map they’d given him at the desk. Nothing much in either stirred his interest. Enervated with the disappointment of arrival, he stretched out on the bed and slept.

When he woke, the room was dark. He rolled to his feet and stood—slowly to build some blood pressure—then stepped over to the window. Even from the top floor he could tell there was commotion below. Lots of people in the plaza. He brushed his teeth and rode the elevator to the bright lights of the lobby and quickly went out into the evening, where the air began to revive him. There were drums out there in that mangle of lights and sound. Bass and snares as if the junior high boys in the school where his wife had taught had taken over the band room. No adult supervision drums. He set a course for that. A group of kids dressed as gauchos passed him. In the shadows, a family packed up their picnic. A dog jumped high into the air to bite a soap bubble riding a column of passing car light. The drumming drifted out of the plaza and faded down a side street, a sound map, replaced by Andean pan pipes and guitars outside a sidewalk restaurant diagonally across the plaza. He went to it and found himself a table, ordered a bottle of American beer to listen.

Then slept late in the morning, forgetting where he was.

Still groggy, he limped across the plaza to the restaurant for coffee served with the little cookies the Argentines called tortilla. The same young woman as the night before served him. Tall and pretty, sandy haired, but with deep, hard parentheses around her mouth when she offered her rather tight smile. A blond dog slept under a nearby table. Another, this one a shaggy brown and white, slept on the plaza’s sidewalk across the street.

They’d always loved dogs, he and his wife. In the days that followed, he noticed the dogs everywhere as he explored the city taking pictures or looking to buy a ball cap. The summer sun burnt his bald head. The dogs seemed well fed and well behaved, but belonging more to some place than to a person. Every time he passed the museum a block away from his hotel, he noticed a long-legged shorthair pacing the entrance steps. Down the side street by the bank, a mutt with an enormous snout hobbled around on three legs, squatting now and then to squirt brief bursts of urine. One day he took a long walk to the shabby neighborhood around the bus station, where the sleeping dog population seemed to double. 

Who did these animals belong to? What person or family? He had no way of knowing. He spoke to no one except his favorite server in what rudimentary Spanish he could dredge up. She did her best to speak English to him and always seemed to be working. “Tienes que vivir aqui,” you must live here, he tried, but wondered if it was supposed to be “Debes.” It didn’t matter. She smiled that world weary smile. “I have to live,” she answered. “You work so hard,” he said, but he never asked about the dogs. The thought remained nothing more than a loose-end’s musings.

When he sat down for lunch on the third day, she had gone home. He couldn’t imagine her any place other than the restaurant. The blond dog slept nearby on the pavement. He tried the local beer for the first time, unsurprisingly called Salta, and the Andean stew called locro. The combination of the heavy stew and the beer filled him up, and he walked off slower than usual and sat in the shade in the center of the plaza, feeling bloated. He couldn’t get comfortable on the wooden bench, but he stayed there, watching people go by. He’d picked that bench because of the dog sleeping by it, but the dog lifted his head and checked him out as soon as he’d sat down, then stood and limped away to curl up on the grass a few yards off. A Basset hound mix, he thought, the first one of these mutts he’d been able to guess at a breed. They were a genetic Andean stew, most of them. 

They’d loved dogs, he and Franny, his wife. His second wife, the good one. He liked to make that distinction. And “dogginess,” she liked to say. Whoever came in after a long day of work let the other know by barking. His favorite was the sharp yapping of a terrier and she’d answer with her wolf-like howls or broken, friendly puppy barks and yaps. If it came from the kitchen, he knew where to find her. When she was upstairs grading papers or inventing lesson plans for her eighth graders, the howls became mournful things begging sympathy. Greta, their collie, joined in from wherever she’d found a comfortable place to sleep, and the house filled with mad barking, each voice trying to convey a mood or suggestion. How to bark if you just wanted to be comforted, how to bark if you wanted to play, how to say it if the play was sexual?

Once he brought one of his more tight-assed colleagues home unexpectedly and when Franny heard the door, she let go with the you-better-watch-out police dog she saved for special occasions. The guy froze on the doorstep, eyes gone wild and lower lip trembling. She claimed innocence. “Oh, you should have told me you were bringing a friend! Come on in! I won’t bite!” In truth, as she confessed later, she heard the car door and saw who was coming from the second floor window.  

After she’d retired from teaching, they’d started the book store together. He was already emeritus professor by then. It had never made any money, that little store. She didn’t care. Laughed it off. They took Greta with them every day. Left the cat there permanently to catch the mice she claimed infested the place, though he’d never seen one. A lark, selling books people couldn’t find at Barnes and Noble. They had poetry readings for the bohemian set, mostly young people. Some had been their students. When she took sick, they sold it. After the diagnosis. By then Greta was old and sick, too. “Help her up on the bed,” Franny had said. “She needs some loving.” That’s the kind of person she was. The love of his life. And still cracking wise and making him laugh the afternoon she died. “I’m gonna go on the Tonight Show,” she croaked, “LIVE, from one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel, it’s The Death Bed Comedian. Talk about ‘knock ‘em dead! Anybody here from out of town?’”

A couple of pretty girls walked by. Their intense conversation pinged back and forth as they hurried past, and their natural comfort with one another landed in some wordless part of his consciousness. He didn’t belong here. “Old Coot on Park Bench,” he whispered and smiled at that. He sat alone like that for more than an hour, then stood up and shuffled off. He looked back and saw the Basset return to his original spot, giving him a last glance before curling up and closing his eyes again.

Another day he followed the sounds of chanting at the far corner of the plaza where he found maybe twenty young people with signs and as many cops standing aside keeping watch. The protest seemed, from what he could glean, to link Monsanto with climate change and the hospitalization of children for malnutrition. On the edge of the crowd, three police officers had stopped a couple of scraggly young Indian guys, checking their identification. The slump-shouldered bigger of the two, with tousled hair and milky eyes, stood aside sucking his thumb, letting his friend do the talking.

That evening he decided to find an ATM. The desk clerk pointed to the arcade across the street. “Two over there and one near the bank,” he said. Dos por alli, y uno cerca del banco, he translated to himself as he crossed the street. You could easily see where the ATMs were by the long lines of mostly women, some bringing small children along, waiting at each. Many carried umbrellas for the regular summer evening showers. At the first, when the woman in front of him put her bank card in, she looked down at the screen and started banging the machine and screaming. A teenaged boy waiting off to the side took her by the elbow and led her away. The ATM had run out of money. He’d stood in that line for forty-five minutes, long enough to hear rumors of bank closings.

The second line was even longer, but that ATM ran out of money almost the minute he’d taken his place at the end of the cue. There was a rush to the ATM on the side street by the bank as the sky opened with thunder and a drenching rain. An elderly women behind him, small and round like the others, stood close and held her umbrella over both of them. He smiled down at her and invited her in closer. She was giving him too much of the coverage and water already soaked one side of the drab house dress she wore. They stood like that for over an hour. When they reached the front of the line, he stepped aside and allowed her to go first and held the umbrella over her as she worked the machine. When he was able to get some money out, the bank took a 20% cut.

Franny would have drawn a line from that little demonstration with the worried police presence through the run on the banks, to her own participation in the anti-war movement and opposition to the neo-fascist Trumpests. “It’s all part of the same struggle,” she would have said. “Fighting the Beast!” which is what she called the System. He thought, yes, she was right. They hadn’t known one another as young people, but he’d been part of that earlier time, too. Now? Knowing the enormity of it? As the poet said, “We make our meek adjustments.” How many years had he taught that poem? It seemed an appropriate line in the circumstances.

Not truly hungry, he took himself to dinner at his restaurant. The rain had stopped, and the pleasant young server with the wry smile was working. Because of her, he’d eaten nowhere else. He always tried to choose the same table. He exchanged simple pleasantries with her, careful not to project more than a gentlemanly warmth. She practiced her English both taking and delivering his orders and chatted when she could. And he couldn’t stop admiring the lovely pink neo-colonial cathedral across the plaza. As he left, thinking of all those women fleeced of their 20% or simply told no, you can’t have your money, he left her most of what he’d taken at the ATM.

He ambled off for a short walk that he knew would end on one or another of the park benches, usually one facing the church, where after dark it was lit up in all its golden Baroque wonder. Alone now, he had time to fill. He knew the formula: “…an honorable pact with solitude.” He’d taught that book a time or two, also. Garcia Marquez. Nice to have handy the consolation of literature, the love of books that somehow had made him an oddball. But that had made his career, too, hadn’t it? That out-of-fashion love had put bread on the table. Still, no room now to ruin his solitude with self-righteous indignation. And, no, he didn’t truly know why he’d come to this place. Silly thing, a bucket list. But here he was in this new world, an old dog himself, and with a head full of quotations. He called them his sweeteners.

He walked slowly back through the dark to the hotel and rode the elevator up to his room, where he opened the window to let in the music and life of evening on the plaza. What might life have been like for himself and Franny in a place like this? A neat little house with an ornate front and its own private courtyard. A stroll through the music in the plaza every evening. The mountains always in the background. He dreamed of it as he settled into bed. Not that their lives had been wanting. No, not at all, and they would have had to meet as young people. He was dreaming an old man’s dream. Franny always said they wouldn’t have liked one another as young people. Hell, he didn’t even like himself at that age. But he fell asleep indulging that silly dream, Franny there with him.

Hours later, he woke. The plaza had gone to sleep. Somewhere in the hotel a faucet ran and then stopped with a hard screech. He lay perfectly still, absorbing the perfectly still night. In the far distance, faintly, in a neighborhood he imagined but had never visited, a dog barked. Just one yap, as if it barked and then listened, waited, then repeated louder, and repeated again. Another, much closer, answered, this one not as faint, but a gruff old-man bark, followed by a third. The first dog let go a paragraph of commentary and was answered by two still nearer voices, apparently agreeing. Soon another answered in high-pitched yelps. His blond restaurant dog. He could tell the location. Then one crisp, authoritative report after another, like military commands, cracked the night from the museum steps, followed by a howling from somewhere far down the street, and the new voices seemed farther and farther off, fainter, maybe coming from the neighborhood near the bus station.

Some barked over the others, rude conversationalists. One toggled between snarls and whimpers. You could imagine him yanking at a chain. Franny could always calm an animal like that. No animal could resist her. She would have enjoyed this moment. The dogs made a sound map of the city.

Those greetings they used to do, when they came into the house, after a long day—she had started that. He imagined climbing out of bed now and going to the window for the simple, nutty fun of barking his lungs out, calling to her. “Where are you? Where have you hidden yourself?” He could almost believe that she would answer. “I’m here,” she would bark in seductive little puppy yaps. “Come find me if you can.” The thought made him almost choke on what a joy it had been.

But he had to let go of so much of Franny.

That was the deal. It’s what you had to do.

But keep the sweetness. You had to keep the sweetness.