Let me tell you where it came from. The day was late on – in a tired, thin shoed, tired foot, tired sun kind of way. A tired thin sky straining to keep within it the ancient sun beating down on the ancient grounds. Nicaragua was old and it was new and hot and busy and cluttered like some kitchen drawer in an old beat flat. It was useful, and loved but messy and frustrating. I walked past, in my thin shoes with my tired feet, some aging convent long abandoned and transformed into this dollar-a-pop tourist buffet of things those tourists can look at but don’t understand. It was as tired as the sun. You know, it is there, but people use it and take it for granted and try to make it something else all the time. I had a dollar. I went in to see the fuss. The big old fuss that every whoring attraction in every whoring country puts on like a bake sale. The old parts were grand, they were narrative and inspiring. The new parts were garish and giggling and you could see the stockings and the garter belts and the bumpy skin on their hard working, vain bodies. I strolled through the wide canyon hallways and under the stone umbrella arches and around the thousand-year-old and wise courtyards with their thousand year old and even wiser plants and trees and dirt. I strolled in and out of rooms big and small and old and tiled wall to wall with crafty, loved, vibrant tiles which comforted my dog-tired soles. Rich tourists with rich cameras bumped about awkwardly smelling like sunblock and cotton and ignorance and gutter fame. They were puppies in some new pen in some far off exotic magazine country.

After some time I found myself in what could have been a basement. Could have been, because I was on the ground level but the floor above was the main floor, the main attraction, where the money was spent and the time spent and meetings held and the arguments had. I was below this floor. So it felt like a basement, but was not. In this place that could have been a basement was a very large, very emotional, very Nicaraguan void. Sentinel pillars of stone stood vigilantly around the room leaving open a large, vast, vapid space in the middle. The floor here was different from the floor everywhere else in that dollar-a-pop convent convertible. The air was musty in a soothing, I-am-home, banana sort of way that tickled my skin and hugged my lungs and made me feel safe, and old, and tired and ready. There was some mash-up of colored, meaningless, afterthought tiles in between those vigilant sentinel pillars of stone. Like a city, or a park, or head office, or the world – the area had some method, had some reason that could only be seen if you were high enough. So I walked up a few creaking, whining, giggling wooden stairs and looked down upon that square, vast floor and saw some complex mosaic of a man. He had a beard, thin eyes, a kind smile, old cellophane wrinkles in the corners of his eyes that were like rivers of wisdom leading to his beard made of time and history. A man that had no doubt done something, or paid for something or done something so that he could pay for something. The wearisome, selfless sun seemed to peak in like some curious child through every archaic crack of wood and every knocked-out hole of stone and every open air courtyard throughout the rest of that expansive, daunting, fatiguing-to-look-at, convent.

I walked back down those creaking, whining, giggling wooden stairs. On my way down I saw something I did not see before. It was under some bulk-head like it knew to lurk in the shadows. Like it knew how valuable it was and how beautiful it was and is. There it sat painted in a decaying, peeling, emotional red skin, a blanket, a covering, a pelt. There it sat in the orange light of the glowing, gleeful sun. There it sat before my tired, thin, straining, tourist eyes. A piano with white keys that had gone yellow that were once in line and straight but now looked like some candy loving child’s parents-in-the-poor-house teeth. The golden pedals of three were warped and contorted like a misshaped women walking down the misshaped streets of colonial Latin America. I approached the piano with weary, curious, infant steps. It was like some star shining in the night sky that could not be ignored. Some star that you saw that night but no one else did and so you were the only one who stared at it, waiting for it to do something special, something Godly. It had some eye-shadowed force field of love around it. A woman who is naturally attractive but whose hair hangs down in negligence of her beauty and whose face sits plain in protest. A woman who is beautiful but does not want to be.

I struck a sour, worn out, hanging-on-for-dear-life key that echoed a sour worn-out din all throughout those vast hallways and umbrella arches and thousand year old courtyards. I turned around to see if someone was looking. The open space was now full. A hundred antique people in antique dress with antique hats and antique smiles looked at me like some time traveling tourist in their seventeenth century tableau.The air was still soothing and hugged me but it was musty no more, and touristic no more, and it was fresh and new and time-honored. Shit eating grins don’t change, they never have and those hundred people in there funny gowns and fluffy suits and vibrant, colorful auras and dark, Latin, brown-sugar skin all starred at me with some blank historic shit eating grin. A young man who was dressed more elaborately than the rest and who was no doubt the subject of whatever celebration they were celebrating, came close to me with his kind face and open hand and fruity step. As he came closer his eyes became less focused on me and more interested in what was beyond me which I knew was only that strange, haunted red piano. The whole scene was too much, too strange, too dream-like and too real. I stepped to the side to look at the piano and the funny man who wanted it. The magic. The imagination. The ghost like transformation of a thing. The piano was gone. Standing in its place was some stunning, beautiful, fantastic, perfect, dark Latin woman of youth and wonder and a hungry sort of wisdom. Her dark hair, thick and flowing like southern honey and her eyes gleaming out her tanned sockets. Her finger nails white against her brown fingers. Her face delicate and strong and flooring at the same time. Her body wrapped in a luscious, long, cloud of billowing red silk dress.

The vintage man said to that vintage woman something like ‘Hey baby, come and dance with me in front of all these people who will be jealous of our beauty and our youth and our love and our future’. And she took his hand and said ‘If they will be so jealous, we must always remember how valuable a thing we have’ with her eyes. The whole fuss was so colonial and special and once-in-a-lifetime I thought to myself how sad and sorry those dollar-a-pop tourists would be knowing they missed this amazing haunt. And how miserable they would be after clicking their cameras away into oblivion to find out that all those cameras shot was an empty space filled with empty air haunted by a thousand ghosts or more. The colonial couple gracefully, romantically glided onto the dance floor like actors in a tourism brochure in some bleak, cold, winter-bogged office or agency. The floor was no longer a complex mosaic of a man’s face, but was a simple, stark, layout of blue and white Nicaraguan craft. The whole gleeful, vibrant, jealous crowd watched the couple with loving, envious, vicarious lenses. I wondered to myself if people back then were born knowing how to dance. How could they have time to learn amongst all the strife, and history, and time, and war and planning. I wondered to myself who the man was on the floor that was once there but had changed. And then I saw him, in the flesh, in the ghostly flesh, standing amongst the crowd, eyes wider, skin tighter, smile healthier. I saw him with his hands held tightly together in awe and gratitude. I saw his eyes in the red beauty’s eyes, and his skin on the red beauty’s skin and his smile in the red beauty’s smile. I saw him watch his daughter glide around that dance floor, that would-be shrine, in happiness and ignorance and love. His was the only glare without jealousy and envy and wonder and was instead of pride and relief and thunderous joy.

Loud noises of guns, and boots, and hate, and prejudice echoed through those empty corridors and vast courtyards. Loud noises of guns, and boots, and hate and prejudice came closer and closer. Marching orders, chants, scared whispers carried on the antique wind. Some other Latin army from some other Latin country across some fake, perforated border was suddenly in the crowd, amongst it, on the dance floor dancing their very own dance of disgust. Guns fired, screams fired, shrieks fired, arms up in the air as the whole scene fired and turned from colonial love to colonial hate. That mosaic tile father stood before the army’s leader in some useless, proud, desperate plea. The lovers held each other tightly. They shot the young male lover for something he did or didn’t do and before they could shoot his bride the old mosaic man got before her and took her bullet, stole her fate. A father’s life to save his daughter’s. That young male lover looked up at his widow-to-be and said something like ‘Run, baby’ and she did run, she ran right to me, right past me and the army shot out a flurry of hateful, ignorant, pointless, tax-paying bullets towards me and her and me and her and me and her. She took more than enough bullets before falling at the foot of some new, not decaying, not peeling still emotional piano painted red behind me. I looked back at the fallen groom who looked upon his fallen bride with fallen eyes of sorrow and of love. I looked back at the groom as he looked up at me, into my fallen eyes of sorrow, right in the eyes I swear, and said ‘Hey man, you there, protect my love, protect my red beauty, any way you can, man’ and as I looked back behind me the bride was gone. All that remained was that piano, only now it was decaying, and peeling and emotional and a worn sort of red.

Now I was alone. All was silent. There was no army upon us, there was no crowd of jealousy watching. There was no loving bride or loving groom or loving scene and the only regretful father to be seen was to be seen amidst the complex mosaic tiles upon the colonial, worn floor. All was as it was and the sour, worn out, hanging-on-for-dear-life note still floated through the old air like sailors on some ocean cloud looking for the land of a better day. I paid a fortune for that piano and now it sits in my modern room surrounded by modern things bought by a modern man and it embodies love and it embodies history and stands for a promise made and the notes and cries and love still hang in the air like frozen rain drops on their way down to the sorry ground. Like some apocalyptic, Nicaraguan death-rattle.

END

 

 

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