The Long Vietnam of My Soul, Part 7

“If the eye believes it, it’s real …”

Duel with cudgels?

More like dueling portraits of Elisabeth in the 600 block of South Macon Street.

One idealized and one drawn to the imperfection in an earlobe.

Basilio began painting the girl across the alley as she stood at the sink, the shade pulled down so far that all he saw was the silhouette of a head shaped like India and pale arms sunk in dishwater up the elbow.

He’d been aware of her presence for a year and had never figured out a way to say hello.

In her first week in the neighborhood, Nieves had persuaded that same girl to go with her for a chili dog on Eastern Avenue and then took her upstairs to a room filled with cardboard boxes above the diner to sit for her portrait.

Grandpop?

He found some of it amusing—Nieves too emblematic of what he’d left behind 60 years ago in Spain for her to wear out so recent a welcome—and mostly hectored the kids who’d turned his house in Grand Central Station to make sure the door was locked when they went out.

To Basilio he wanted to ask in English: “Can you paint an apple baked soft in the oven, an apple filled with cinnamon and raisins?”

To Nieves in the language of the Inquisition: “A proper girl doesn’t leave the house alone at night …”

But he said nothing, using a red pencil in the margins of the afternoon paper to figure how many haircuts he had left before he could join his beloved apple on the other side of the river.

Basilio’s Elisabeth paintings—done in black crayon with pastels of yellow and gray—would never amount to anything more than a minor phase.

The Nieves paintings – not the ones he did of her but the ones Nieves painted in her brief time in Baltimore – were another story altogether; so good that Basilio set them beneath a microscope to find the seams.

He never did, for in whole cloth there is nothing but seams.

Is that fucked up enough for you?

Basilio’s greatest work lay on the other side of his cousin’s long and tragic summer, paintings of ruined buildings  that would make his yearning for the stupid girl across the alley look like a lollipop.

Above the hot dog diner, Nieves told Elisabeth to remove her jeans but keep on her shirt, placing her eager subject between windows that looked out on the Avenue – south toward freighters in the harbor - while using a hunk of charcoal to draw graceful arcs across butcher’s paper tacked to the wall.

Elisabeth tried to speak—“Remember, I have to get the kids in an hour, remember I told you when we left”—but Nieves shushed her.

All addicts, regardless of preferred substance, share a single, dominant symptom.

They are never quite present when you speak to them.