Palomino ignored me as if I weren’t there. Without a word, and to my embarrassment, he took off all his clothes and rolled them into the sleeping bag.
I felt extremely uncomfortable. Was this some a come on?
Was he going to suggest I follow suit?
Before I could verbalize my apprehension or even think it all the way through, he jumped onto the box and, with a large piece of charcoal, started to draw on the wall in great confident sweeping strokes, charcoal dust raining down on him like black snow. It would have ruined his clothes.
I watched in awe as he began to fill the space with a giant crucifix. Even before finishing the face of the Christ, Palomino was already sketching Roman soldiers and mourning women. He seemed unable to complete one scene without jumping to another; back and forth he darted as each figure rapidly took shape in bold black against the white wall. Ignored, I moved out of his way so that he could continue the magnificent panorama. The only sound was the patter of rain dripping from the roof, Palomino’s labored grunts, and the constant scratch of charcoal.
I decided to check out the rest of the house. The walls in every room were filled with stunningly realistic charcoal drawings. In the master bedroom, he’d depicted Torquemada’s Inquisition. In another bedroom, a barbed-wire fence held starving concentration camp survivors, broken mouths and dead eyes, screamed at me in silence. In the hall and bathroom, innocents burned at stakes and other explicit executions decried centuries of injustice and horror.
By now the sun was down. I fumbled my way back to the living room where, by the flickering light of candles, Palomino had finished his latest mural: Christ on the cross, Christ carried to His sepulcher, Christ in the arms of Mary, a pieta of such incredible poignancy I wanted to cry. Like every other suffering figure in that house, Christ and his mother had almond eyes, Asian features.
The sweat-matted, charcoal-covered artist crouched in a corner, scooping a sharp-smelling goop from one of the Sterno cans. Without a word, Palomino spread it on the wall, struck a match, and watched the combustible gel flare up before he carefully packed his belongings in the wooden box and carried it toward the door.
Outside, Palomino squatted in the rain and watched the flames eat their way through the old wooden structure. I looked down the street and realized the other burned out houses must also have been his work.
I don’t know if it was the rain, or if the naked man was crying as charcoal sludge ran from his face in thick dark rivulets, but his voice was strong.
“No matter how many we killed, and whether we could see them or not, they had faces.
They always had faces.”
A View From The Sanctuary
Actually, it was my wife who suggested that I join the church choir.
The idea was resplendent with promise.
It had been many years since I last regularly attended Church, and I wouldn’t have gone back if it were not for my stepdaughter, Priscilla making her first communion. Priss was part of the package when I strayed unwarily into matrimony with her mother, Bridget-The-All-Consuming. Nothing had changed in the Church. There was still an annoying amount of kneeling and sitting and standing and suffering through unending sermons with little or no application to the realities of life, except for the repetitious pleas for funds.
By joining the choir I would be able to sit in the high loft in the back of the church and avoid the calisthenics inherent in Catholic ceremonies. I could exercise my baritone voice —which I must admit is quite adequate — and sit with some of the more attractive members of the congregation, who seemed to gravitate toward the choral arts.
It is my intention to be completely honest in this narrative, even if it is at the expense of my own dignity. So, if the truth were to be known, I really joined the choir because ignoring a suggestion of Bridget-The-Queen-Of-Connemara would probably lead to more recriminations than my pacifist soul could endure in the battlefield of our relatively recent nuptials.
It would also allow me at least one night out a week for
rehearsals. And I would not have to put up with the irritating whisper-hiss of Saint Bridget’s incessant soto voce prayers during mass.
Besides, it wasn’t as if I was going to miss the Sunday football games on television. Her Ladyship had already declared televised sports anathema in our living room. Choir proved to be a mixed blessing. The delightful young ladies I’d spotted before joining all seemed to be in the process of phasing out and moving on to boyfriends, husbands and pregnancy — not necessarily in that order (even Catholics transgress). The newer recruits were so old they were probably greasing the skid of their downward slide into senility with healthy dollops of Geritol and Metamucil. Soon we were banished from the anonymous bliss of the choir loft, high in the back of the large church. The pastor hired a real musician to direct the choir — the last director having run off with a lovely Eurasian soprano, who was married to some naive soul in the bass section who could never understand why his wife was getting all the solos. He was completely unaware of her duets.
Adrian Donatello immediately announced that the setup of a choir loft and organ in the back of the church, and everything else in the front, was thoroughly inadequate, archaic, and an insult to his integrity. He was damned if he would direct the requirements of musical worship from the outer reaches of the universe.
He was probably right. But when he ordered us down from our heavenly refuge, and indicated that from then on we would sit in the sanctuary, I could only mentally rebel. Remember, I had been cohabiting for over a year, under the guise of blissful matrimony, with Her Highness Bridget-The-Most-Righteous, and silence before any throne of power had already become second nature.
I kept my mouth shut and traipsed down the stairs, through the nave of the church, and onto the carpeted expanse of the sanctuary with my folding chair tucked under one arm and my music under the other just like everyone else.
There would definitely be no nose-picking, sermon-
sleeping, leg-crossing, or dirty joke telling with the choir fully
exposed in front of the whole congregation. I would definitely have to find something else to distract myself during those portions of the service when we were not required to perform. I told myself, trying to put a positive spin on things, that there should be more than enough entertainment available in watching the congregation. So, I set out to find one or two of the more attractive young ladies in the assembly to fixate on and pass the time productively when not singing or in humble prayer.
I said I would adhere to a most honest and forthright accounting of these events, regardless of the light cast upon myself. But, it should be understood that appreciating the female of the species is not necessarily mutually exclusive with piety and a deep spiritual experience. After all, they are God’s most glorious creation — with some Bridgitarian exceptions. This new Sunday avocation, along with the maestro’s willingness to abandon much of the standard liturgical rote and replace it with the works of Mozart, Vivaldi and Beethoven, was a satisfactory palliative to keep my participation in the choir alive. This would also necessitate my continued absence from the pew next to Bridget-The-Pious and her darling little witch-in-training, my stepdaughter.
It was an amazing revelation to discover that the congregation had faces. However, on the very first Sunday we were remanded to complete exposure in the sanctuary, I was disappointed that I didn’t see even one sweet young thing over whom I could fantasize. My attention, instead, was immediately taken by a man and woman in the front row, sitting directly on the center aisle: two little people — midgets. For all I knew they could have been coming to church here for years. My prior attendance at mass, until this stint of service in the choir, was as meager as my sins were numerous; and from the choir loft it was completely impossible to identify anyone in the front pews.
These two were completely similar in size and diminutive perfection, even to their weathered faces, which, though wrinkled by
age, still retained a luster of youthful complexion. There could not have been more than an inch difference between the two of them, and that inch would still be well under four feet.
y first reaction was: how remarkable two such perfectly matched individuals could meet, bond and continue their extraordinary existence together in a world of curious and unsympathetic giants.
Both moved with such grace and ease that I thought immediately they must once have been circus performers. Perhaps they had moved to our city to retire from the rigors of show business, and here sought the anonymity of a community, which would allow them privacy, far removed from a sideshow environment. I chided myself for this terrible stereotyping and put it aside.
I assumed them to be married; a blissful union, which most of us, who labor in the vineyards of marital turmoil, have long since surrendered to the weeds of reality. Of course this was all conjecture on my part. But it certainly occupied my time between hymns
Each week the choir would gather forty-five minutes before services to put on our gold robes — St. Malachi’s was big on gold and gilt — and rehearse in the sanctuary. I noticed that the dapper miniatures would appear well before the beginning of mass, either to secure their places in the front row, or perhaps to enjoy the entertainment value of our vocal exercises. After all, dear Adrian, our director, had much more hair and talent than patience, which added to the mystique of a musical force-majeure, providing spirited histrionics during each of our rehearsals.
The choir season, beginning in September, was well underway when my fascination with the midget couple was distracted by the lovely young thing, who now sat in the middle of the same front pew each Sunday.
I say “lovely young thing” advisedly, as she was one of those eternal creatures unique to her sex, who would forever be of indeterminate age. She could have been fifteen or thirty-five. It was impossible to tell with the awkward covert glances I allowed myself from my vantage point in the Sanctuary.
The girl had a luscious café con leche complexion which was
much more leche than café. It was smooth and glowed with vitality. But what attracted my attention the most were her eyes. That sloe-eyed, heavy-lidded look of idle curiosity just sucked me right into any number of decidedly unliturgical fantasies, so that I often had to shift my gaze over to the little people just to divert myself.
By the seventh week of the choir season, the girl and I had become quite adept at playing eye tag. She would look at me, and I would pretend to be otherwise occupied; and whenever she looked away, or became involved in her worship, I took advantage of the moment to study her lovely face and the more mysterious delights of form and figure.
Not that anything would have ever come of this harmless flirtation. I was still intent on honoring the letter of the law regarding my marital vows — no matter how difficult or unrewarding being married to the deposed Queen of Ireland might be — and would never presume to advance this dalliance-from-a-distance to the next level of encounter. In the meantime, I noticed that the alternate objects of my attention, the little people, were not doing so well. Admittedly, the midgets were both well advanced in age, the years finely etched on their brows as if a master craftsman had been commissioned to depict the mortality of all our years on their small faces. But now they looked much older than I had first noticed. Especially the woman. Lines and creases appeared to be incised into deeper rivulets of time and her complexion had turned pasty and sallow. She had lost ill-afforded weight, and looked emaciated. The little fellow by her side appeared thin and weary, however his reservoir of internal fortitude seemed to partially ward off the ravages of whatever it was that infected them.
Now, as they entered the church to watch our pre-mass vocal gymnastics, I could see that the woman had to lean heavily on her mate’s arm to make it all the way down the aisle to their appointed places.
But one thing to their credit, there was never a compromise in either their dignity or their impeccable apparel. He was always dressed in a neatly pressed suit with a natty matching bow tie, and she wore a variety of mature dresses, which were so delicately tailored to her size that they had to be original creations made especially for her.
Finally, there was the Sunday when only the little man made his way gingerly down the aisle to take his place in the audience of our musical-exercises.
I wondered about the woman’s absence, but my knowledge of these two was so recent that I had nothing upon which to base a judgment regarding her well-being. Perhaps it was a bout of influenza, and soon she would be back to join our happy convocation.
She wasn’t. Over the next two weeks only the little man appeared; thin, but still resplendent in his suit, crisp white shirt and invariable bow tie. I have to admit that he wasn’t looking so spunky.
During this time, I noticed that my unwitting partner in unilateral licentious fantasies, the sloe-eyed girl, had adjusted to the new dynamics of the front pew and frequently sat next to the little man.
Jealously, I watched as she engaged him in conversation while waiting for services to begin, and covertly I once saw her give him a sociable hug and kiss on the cheek. Who could resist that miniature cheek!
Then suddenly, the girl too was gone from Sunday worship. I assumed this was some change in her personal circumstances or, perhaps, a desire to avoid the raucous exuberance of our choral manifestations. Two weeks after the girl abandoned my solitary flights of fancy, the small woman returned.
Maybe it had been a trip to the spas of Palm Springs, or an extensive rehabilitation under expert care, but the little lady had put her weight back on and was positively glowing with health. And for that matter, so was her hubby. Both of them sported blooming revitalized complexions. The creases and lines had faded and no longer threatened to slice parts of their faces into small islands of unattached expressions.
Their Sunday jaunt down the aisle was now as sprightly as that of two teenagers, and it was only their dignified demeanor that identified them as adults rather than children dressing up. I welcomed the woman back with a slight nod of my head when I thought that I could get away with the movement under Adrian’s scrupulous gaze. And she, in turn, bobbed slightly in my direction to acknowledge my salutation.
The liturgical calendar moved from Ordinary Time into the new year of Advent, and we began preparation for Christmas. The tiresome tedium of Sunday services was broken by an occasional anthem of seasonal familiarity — and my constant search for a replacement for the sloe-eyed girl, who never did return.
At last someone else as attractive as my lost fixation decided to move up and take an exposed berth in the front pew. She was a pretty little thing in that wholesome middle-America sort of way. Immediately I pictured her shucking corn, clucking to the chickens, and slipping her delicate warm hands up and down eagerly waiting teats as she gave bossy relief from a full udder.
With that last vision, you can certainly see how sexually charged my once innocent reveries had become. Don’t forget, I promised honesty in this recitation. To say my not-so-innocent flights of fancy had little or nothing to do with Frigid Bridget’s companionship in our marriage bed would be misleading. The fact that this girl braided her hair and usually came to church in bright spring gingham, even in the midst of winter, made her seem all the more appealing. She brought a bright ray of sunshine into a cold church, surrounded by winter’s snow and the frozen embryos of springtime.
The young lady did not seem to notice my attentions, and whenever her eyes would move toward the choir — just on the off chance I would be caught staring — mine shifted over to the next tableau available: the two perfect little Munchkins in their Sunday best.
Around Christmas I noticed that the little Missus was starting to look peaked again and attributed it to the severity of the season. Indeed, we had been suffering through storm after storm, which left many stranded or house- bound. Even the church on Christmas Eve, when the back-sliders were usually stacked in the aisles,
lacked its normal population.
But, alone again, the little man was there in a coal black suit
with a bright red bow tie. He looked like he shouldn’t have left his or his wife’s sick bed for these ceremonies. I was worried. Whatever his own recurrent affliction, it was worse this time. But I didn’t have long to dwell on this since the object of my latest daydreams, Miss Middle-America, was there also. For this special night she had abandoned her I’m-Dorothy-from-Kansas outfits in favor an off the shoulder number so that her spectacular attributes graced the first row of the church next to my sickly little buddy.
I was overcome by a sudden depression when I realized that once we had sung everything from “For Unto Us A Child Is Born,” to “The Hallelujah Chorus,” I would have only the bleak prospects of going home to our over-decorated house and there, share cups of hot chocolate with Peat-Bog-Bridget and the petulant Princess Priscilla, who would be whining to open her presents.
The Sunday after Christmas saw the weather better, but attendance in church depleted by the New Years doldrums. And the front pew was no exception. None of my little first row flock was there to hear my vocal incantations. And wouldn’t you know it, we did a piece that allowed me the opportunity to let rip a particularly vicious arpeggio which both incurred the wrath of Maestro Donatello and left no doubt as to who was singing it. I had no one for whom to show off my little party piece, but the intrepid Battleship Bridget and her destroyer escort, Priscilla.
We took two weeks off from choir after our Yuletide labors, and when we returned to the sanctuary all was again right with the world. Adrian was his usual insufferable, perfectionist self, demanding more than mediocrity out of our begrudging group, and the front pew during mass was again occupied by the diminutive duo who looked to be in the finest fettle of glowing health.
Miss American Pie had evidently decided that the choir was more than she could tolerate and sought the haven of another parish, because I never saw her again.