The Long Vietnam of My Soul, Part 8

This is a long story with a short arc, from Basilio’s 30th birthday in late May through the last days of August.

Let me take you down . . .

Let me take you.

Let me take.

Let me give you a thimble of dirt from Galicia in a miniature bottle of Anis del Mono, diamonds cut into the glass.

On one of those blistering afternoons—August 27, the anniversary of the day the Beatles met Elvis—Nieves hooked her pinky into one of Basilio’s belt loops and led him to the studio on the third floor.

Meeting Elvis was the only thing the band wanted from America.

Said George: “By the time we got near his house we’d forgotten where we were going …”

Call it sex, call it sick, call it sleep—call it anything but love when Nieves and Basilio lay together for the first and last time, rolling beneath the hole in the rafters he’d made to paint by moonlight.

The marks left on Basilio—lines on his face and hands, lines on the left and right—were indelible.

It was over by Labor Day and it never ended.

But first, June.

Nieves let the charcoal portrait of Elisabeth nailed to the wall on the second floor of the Chili Dog Emporium (where it would hang, unnoticed, long after the diner changed hands to fourth-generation Greeks) and resisted the —“I was on the urge,” she told a stranger—to see what was going on in the alley behind the building.

Elisabeth was late picking up her kids, as she would be time and time again for months (this thoughtlessness, compounded by other derelictions would be evidence in her divorce) and Nieves returned to Macon Street to make dinner for Grandpop.

Basilio was off on foot somewhere, looking for coins in the street, searching for the right abandoned building upon whose walls he would paint a mural percolating behind his forehead.

“How’s my brother?” asked Grandpop as Nieves fried steak and potatoes in olive oil and garlic on top of the stove.

Grandpop had not seen his younger brother—Nieves’ grandfather—since paying his way from Gibraltar to Baltimore by shoveling coal into the boiler of a tramp steamer.

“He’s good,” said Nieves.

“Getting old like me,” said Grandpop.

“No,” said Nieves.

“Yes,” smiled Grandpop.         

Nieves turned down the flame under the skillet and took a seat across from Grandpop, the stove at her back. From her pocket, she took a small bottle wrapped in red and yellow tissue and pushed it across the table like a chess piece. It rested on a page of three paragraph crime stories in the afternoon paper.

Grandpop had circled the especially stupid and heinous items with a red pencil, forgetting—in the opacity of old age—that the red circle can land on anyone’s house.

[And would fall on his before the summer was out.]

 “What’s this?”

“Open it,” said Nieves.

A miniature anisette bottle filled with dirt from the Boullosa village.

“Tierra sagrado . . .”

Before Basilio could come home and mix it with red and yellow paint for his latest canvas – a portrait of Elisabeth and Nieves walking hand-in-hand down Eastern Avenue – Grandpop sprinkled the dirt under his pepper plants.

Grandpop, setting the bottle next to the wine carafe: “Quiere usted un postre?”

Nieves: “Siempre dulces, Tio Basilio.”