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THE WORK OF ANDREW RAMER

excerpt from Random Voices (unpublished)

FROM HIS LITTLE TABLE

Reading a story, he decided, should be like taking a car to one of those new car washes. Each word should be a bristle on the great brush of paragraphs. And through that procession of brushes the mind of the reader should go. To be cleaned, but only on the outside. Nothing else should change. Not structures or functions. The inside should remain the same, unless the reader wants to change it. But a story should make the outside glow again. So he resigned from the party, gave up his membership. He felt that it was wrong for him to try and create vast social changes with his art. And equally wrong to try and change the innermost insides of his readers.

“I am not a prophet,” he took to saying. “I simply run the local car wash.” Naturally his political friends turned against him, calling him a reactionary, a reformist, concerned with making only cosmetic changes. And they said for the first time what many of them felt all along but never said when he was champion of their cause, that he wasn’t a good writer anyway, that Luis Flores. They said that he was like sand in water, which falls to the bottom, while they moved on the surface with the waves. And when they were sitting at home together, they would turn to each other and whisper about the company he kept. “Still living with his mother at thirty-five. Makes you wonder.”

So he sat every morning in his favorite cafe. He sat by himself with the bound school notebooks that he had written in since childhood. And he wrote about the things that he had seen that day. Those things that came to him like children come to tourists yelling, “Meester, Meester, take my peecture.” Tugging on the camera of his mind. Slipping hands into his pockets, looking for coins, for treasures.

Now the critics of the right and the press of the right began to take notice of him. It bided its time and when it was certain that he would not go back to his old companions, it welcomed him into its ranks by saying what an excellent stylist he had become, after he abandoned the party and began to write from his own voice instead.

He laughed when he read the papers, at his little marble table. It seemed to him that the right was snuggling up to him in hopes of making him its second violin, when he was concerned only with hitting two polished sticks together. And even his mother asked, “Luis, what is this?” Pulling a crumpled story from her bag. “I read it on the bus. What is it?” So he tried to explain to her about the car wash. That he didn’t want to tell stories so much as just see things and tell about them. That he wanted to be in words no different than the blurry photographs taken with little box cameras, that fill up all of those family albums. “For this,” she said, “waving the crumpled pages in the air above her head, “for this you worked so hard. And now, and now -- you betray yourself.” Remembering how they used to stop her in the square and say, “Senora, how proud you must be of your genius.”

But something impelled him. The voice that he made the title of his newest book, “The Sounds of Littleness.” But the critics did not understand him. One compared him to a saint of the church who died, he was certain, not from holiness so much as from a massive and ultimately fatal case of self-denial. While a former colleague accused him of trying to disguise a comic book mentality under the stamp of petty bourgeois mediocrity. And then even his publisher began to make noise when he saw a rough draft of a work in progress, a longer collection of such little pieces. “Maybe you need a new editor, Flores,” he suggested. But Luis didn’t care. He was writing for the first time as he felt he should. And in the company of his muses, the printed page was only a small part of the music.

So he worked and worked, and he didn’t see the changes. He lived on the outside, looking in, not on the inside looking out. So he didn’t see the ferment, even when his old friends, and the critics, each found their way to his little corner table. No, he saw the loss of a skate key by Elena across the hall, the death of a pet, two lovers in an alley, a manuscript destroyed by a forgotten cigarette.

“So it’s funny,” he said to himself on the morning when the voice on the phone of his uncle awakened to tell him that a military junta had taken over the government. “Funny that I don’t feel afraid, upset or even excited.” His old friends, the critics and his editor felt all of those things. Some were afraid of past connections, while others hoped to now be rewarded by them. No, he decided, he felt the same. As he walked down the stairs, down the street, as he walked to his cafe. There were soldiers in the street, on rooftops, everywhere. There were tanks in the plaza. And yet, he wanted the air to change. He wanted to see the sky turn green or red. He wanted something external to announce to him that the government was different. But nature was indifferent. Everything was exactly the same. The sky so blue and brilliant that he was certain that even the general and the junta could feel the joy that flowed from it.

He didn’t know that the editor supported him when the junta began to take away his old friends. The editor and his publisher told them to spare him, because he’s a like a child, because the people will listen to him. So the papers began to praise his work in new ways, hoping to win him over. And once again people stopped his mother in the market, and his brothers, all of them married, to tell them how much they liked his new work. “Can they be so bad, Luis, if they can tell how great a genius you are?” his mother asked him. But he had no answer. Only questions. Coming as one by one his old friends were taken away, their books and their paintings destroyed. Their names obliterated. And then he heard stories, about how children were disappearing. And he tried to ask questions. But everyone said to him, “Flores, you are a writer. What can you know of these things? A writer is here to make beauty, is he not? Not here to stare into the face of ugliness.”

From the beginning, though, he marched in marches, he signed petitions. But it wasn’t until he was surrounded by armed soldiers in the midst of a huge angry crowd, screaming in front of the presidential palace where the general had installed himself, where one by one all the people who had not fled were taken away, kicking and screaming, dragged into busses, bludgeoned and bloody, till only he was left, with broken signs and trampled leaflets scattered all around him on the paving stones -- it was only them that he began to understand. That he could sign every petition, chant every anti-junta chant till he was hoarse, march in marches till all of his shoes wore thin, and he would still be praised by the newspapers, and nothing would happen to him.

He went to the publisher of the leading paper in the city. He was embarrassed, and he was furious. He said to the publisher, “You can’t use me this way.” The publisher smiled at him across the vast, polished mahogany expanse of his empty desk and said, “Meaning Luis that you want to be taken away.” He responded in the negative, shaking fists above the battleship-broad desk. “Then you are on our side. Don’t you see? It isn’t left and right anymore. It’s who wants to stay that counts.” Luis sighed and said, “I don’t want to stay. Or go. I only want to write.” The publisher laughed and sent him away, with a slap on the back. “From such weakness,” he said to the editorial board, “comes our kind of strength.”

For a time Luis Flores considered, not not writing, for that was the only thing he knew how to do, but not sending his writing out. But because it was the only thing he knew how to do, and because he was supporting not only himself but also his widowed mother Rosa, now that his brothers all had families of their own, he had no other choice. The three attempts he had made when he graduated from the university to hold down respectable jobs, working in an uncle’s accountancy firm, working as a clerk in the city’s largest foreign language book store, and even landing a job in a prestigious advertising company, writing copy for magazines -- all ended with his being fired before he had received his first paycheck. Luis had to write. He knew that, and he had to send his work out too. He had no other choice.

Then, a funny thing began to happen. With Luis’s books praised everywhere. With foreign readers beginning to notice them, since a famous author in the United States began to translate them. With scarcely anything to read in his own country that wasn’t churned out by the junta-supporting writers. With his name on petitions and his face in all the papers, at protest marches and rallies, all supplied by the junta itself, a token symbol of their tolerance—people began to see things in his work that he did not see himself, that he had never intended. The loss of a little girl’s skate key, something that had happened in the garden in front of his building one morning as he was going to the cafe, as he passed her on her knees, crying, that he wrote about simply because it happened—became for many people an emblem of the loss of control they had over their lives. So that everywhere in the city, in the nation, people began to wear skate keys around their necks. And in the outskirts of the city, the Key Brigade was organized, a resistance organization committed to defeating the junta through acts of civil disobedience, and if necessary, violence.

And his story about the manuscript that was destroyed when the author did not see his cigarette roll out of the ashtray on his cluttered writing table, when he went to make another pot of coffee -- became a metaphor for the people of the kind of numbness the general and his junta wanted to impose on them, that they had to avoid at all costs—and not just the retelling of something that had happened to one of Luis’s old friends, now missing. So all over the city, in luxurious high rise buildings with uniformed doormen, and in the squalid, over-crowded slums those doormen went home to, groups were formed to help people stop smoking and stop drinking coffee. In fact, they were given official support by the general’s own doctor, whose brother ran a cancer research facility. He did not know that those groups were a cover, a front, for anti-government activity. But Luis kept on writing. And when people came up to his little marble table in the corner of the cafe, the one with a small potted fern in a basket hanging over it, to tell him how inspired they had been by his work, he would tell them about the car wash, about being a camera. Waiting for the sky to change to turquoise or magenta.

Then, on a Tuesday morning, shortly after his mother had gone out to the market, just as he had slipped into his jacket and was about to leave the flat—the soldiers of the junta came to get him. So long as his work only inspired protests and marches, the junta supported him. They liked the protests and marches, which brought their enemies together in one place. And they did not mind the cigarette boycott. As all of their cigarettes were imported, it kept more money at home to spend, and the junta liked that. But the coffee boycott -- that was another thing! For Luis Flores lived in a coffee growing country. And even if foreign sales were high, the sudden, dangerous drop in domestic coffee sales was something that the junta could not tolerate.

Because of his fame, the soldiers who came to get Flores allowed him to take a suitcase of clothing, several notebooks to write in, and several of his favorite books to read; Borges, Kafka and Calvino, to be expected. Jane Austen, a surprise to one of the soldiers who noticed. And in prison, they treated him like royalty. They fed him on china plates and gave him wine for dinner, while in other parts of the same prison, teenagers, even little children, were being tortured to death, in hopes of their revealing what went on in the anti-smoking and anti-coffee clinics. And Luis’s publisher and editor were allowed to visit him. For the story was given out that he was in jail not for resistance to the junta but for tax evasion. The junta thought that the suggestion that Flores was far richer than he appeared would distance his followers, and make him appear to be in secret alignment with the junta.

One afternoon, around 4:30, the general himself came to visit Luis Flores. His attendants brought in a large old carved mahogany chair for him to sit in. He offered Luis a cigar and told him how much he enjoyed his stories. In the end, just before he was leaving, the general pulled a copy of “The Sounds of Littleness” out of a pocket in his heavily braided and bemedalled jacket and asked Luis if he would be so good as to autograph it for Isabella, his daughter. On her next visit, Luis’s mother told him how she had read all about the general’s visit in the paper. How they had shared cigars and how Luis had autographed Isabella’s book. Senora Flores was pleased with her son. He himself remained puzzled why such a thing should me made into news.

One night Luis was sitting at the table in his cell. He was writing in one of the school notebooks he had always written in. He was writing about one of the guards in the prison, an older man who brought him his dinner. A man with a slight hunckback. A man with a pencil-line mustache and long thin sideburns that were shaved in such a way that they curved toward the corners of his lips. Luis was so involved in his writing, trying to get down the exact relation between the guard's dapper face and his doubled back that he was only half, no only a quarter aware of the noises outside his window, beyond the palm trees, in the plaza and beyond it. It was only when his little sketch was done, when he’d washed and used the little toilet behind a heavy, flower-painted folding screen, when he’d slipped out of his clothes, into his pajamas, then into bed, that he fully noticed what was going on. There was the sound of screaming, the sounds of rockets fired in the night. And Luis fell into sleep wondering why there was such a commotion in the night, wondering if it was already soccer season.

From the point on, things were not the same. The same man came to feed Luis, but the food he brought was in smaller and smaller amounts, till it became in the end no more than a bowl of gruel three times a day, some hard bread, a jug of water with a bit of wine in it, and then not even that. Luis noticed it at first, but didn’t notice. He was too busy writing. And then too weak to notice—when his meal came one day, when the rioting and the gunshots and the explosions in the city became constant. And then—stopped.

The junta fell to the opposition forces on a Friday afternoon. While most of the general’s inner circle were captured in their offices in the presidential palace, the general himself was taken prisoner on the golf course, at the second hole. His wife was having her nails done in the club house beauty parlor. His daughter, sitting under an umbrella in a long fur coat, was lost in Luis’s most recent story, about a boy and a dolphin, when the soldiers of the opposition arrived in jeeps and on golf carts.

The opposition had wanted to make a hero out of Luis Flores. No one had ever believed that he was a collaborator. Everyone knew that the junta had used him for their own propaganda purposes. But because the general’s daughter had been reading an autographed copy of his most recent book, published by the same junta that had kept him in prison, and because of his early royal treatment there, several of the opposition leaders, now the members of the new interim government, accused him of being a collaborator. They demanded that he go on trial along with the other criminals of the general’s regime. But when they found him in his prison cell, as luxurious as it was for a prison, he was delirious and weighed only ninety-seven pounds. His supporters in the new government had hoped that he would cry out something memorable upon his release, something highly quotable, preferably about Freedom. But all that he said, as two soldiers took him by the arms and led him out into the sunlight again was, “Thank you. It will be nice to sit in the sun at my old table in the cafe again.” While his opponents in the new government, hoping to find him plump and rosy, remembering how he had left their party once before, remembering all sorts of things about him, both sordid and pitiable -- were dismayed to find him emaciated and incontinent, not exactly wearing the regalia of the junta’s writer laureate. So, embarrassed by his simple “Thank you,” embarrassed by his position, or lack of one, the interim government chose to ignore him instead, and sent him back to his mother’s apartment.

His mother, sobbing, embraced him again and again, crushing him to her chest and thrusting him away to look at the shrunken face she feared to never see again, oblivious to the pain and even the bruises she was causing him. And his brothers and their wives and children, eyes damp, they also embraced him, then carried him into his room, undressed him, sponged him clean, changed him and put him to bed. Between her sobs his mother alternately offered thanks to Almighty God and then reprimanded Luis for not having gone to medical school as his father had begged him to do on his deathbed. But all that Luis said, in his delirium was, not “I could have been another Chekhov,” but, “Bring me a pencil and my notebooks. Bring me a pencil.”

It took several months for him to regain his strength. At first, all that he could eat was soup stock, chicken, meat, or fish. He choked on anything solid. And for a while it was even hard for him to walk. But in time he was able to venture out of the apartment, for a brief walk around the block. Then after that, when the weather changed, his doctors allowed him to sit in the sun in the park two blocks away, for an hour a day. It was only after that that they allowed him to actually write again. And one day, a beautiful spring day when the sky was blue and flawless as a sapphire in a store window on a silver ring, he walked to the corner with his cane, waited for the bus, and took it all the way downtown, to his favorite cafe.

The plant was gone. And so were several of the waters. But the owner, Ramon, bald and now bent, he was still there, and came out to welcome Luis Flores, to lead him back to his favorite little table. “We let no one else sit there, Senor,” he said. And then one by one, people from the right and people from the left, they came over to shake his hand, to tell them their stories. For no matter who they are, everyone who had survived—had survived. And how could there not be stories.

At first, Luis did not mind the interruptions. He welcomed the visitors as does anyone who finds himself alive when he might very easily be dead, when he expected himself to be dead. But in time he began to resent them. The ones from the left who saw him as a hero, and the ones from the right who saw him as a survivor of the old regime. He would talk to them and tell himself again and again that people are a writer’s palette. But then one day he came to the cafe with a card in his hatband that read, not PRESS, as all reporters in the capital wore, but simply WRITING. And he did not take his hat off when Ramon led him to his table, that old straw hat he wore whenever it was summer. In spite of the heat and in spite of the sweat that beaded up on his forehead, he kept his hat on with the sign pointing out toward anyone that might approach him. And he forced himself to not look up when he heard the sound of footsteps drawing near, save those of Ramon, coming with another cup of coffee, or with another handful of freshly sharpened pencils.

And it worked. He was older now. People said he was eccentric. Some said it was prison. Others said he deserved some respect. He had kept the grey beard that grew in when he was in prison. Some said he looked like Tolstoy, “Our own Tolstoy.” He said, “I look like an old man with his head behind the cloth of one of those old fashioned cameras. The kind where you had to pose and remain standing without motion till the camera took your image onto silver.” And Ramon, who would not let any of the waiters serve him, brought him rolls and coffee silently. And across the street people would gather to watch him through the window. And everyone once in a while, he would look up, and smile. And the people across the street, the mothers whose children had not come home, the mothers who took their children to see him, who said “Hush” when those children wanted to call out to him, they never understood that he was looking up in their direction -- to see if the sky had changed its color yet, if it was gold or coral or lime green. But it was only blue or grey, or sometimes tinged with red. So he would pick up his pencil or pen again, and go back to his writing, his waiting. Go back to his making of verses that clean what can be changed.