Archive for the ‘Luc Reid’ Category
Delayed Appearance of the Monkey God
Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008
Here was how it was supposed to happen: every forty-nine years, we march down the Sacred Avenue from the temple to the Grove of the Holy Fools, then to the cliffs over the ocean, and we’re supposed to walk on across the sky and into Paradise. But instead, the Monkey God sends a stampede of water buffalo across our path and we have to turn back. Then we go to our homes and eat the New Year’s feast, and we have music, and all the unmarried girls dance the coin dance, and everyone has a wonderful time.
This year there was more mischief to be done than usual, and the monkey god was busy. The Americans were visiting, and the monkey god had to teach them humility. The university had started courses on atheist philosophy, and the monkey god had to teach them that even seemingly well-built university classrooms can be overrun with army ants sometimes. And there were all the perfect kisses to interrupt and haughty civil servants to bring low and all of the many things the monkey god normally does, and I suppose he just got busy and didn’t notice the time. When he arrived, he was more than three hours late, and the only one left in the city was me, because I was too sick to be moved farther than the roof garden.
The Monkey God found me on the roof garden and stared at me as he wandered through, irritably eating flowers. Finally he spoke, which he doesn’t like to do.
“And?” he said.
“You’re too late,” I said. “They went over the cliff.”
“And what happened?”
“I couldn’t see from here. You’ll have to go look for yourself.”
He said he didn’t want to. Then his eyes went wide and he pointed past me to the Grand Square. “There they are!”
I looked, but nobody was there. There was a lurch, and I fell to the ground. When I looked back, the Monkey God was gone, and so was my bed.
I hope some of them decided not to try the cliff. It will be getting cold in a couple of hours.
Behind the Girl’s School in the Piazza Pescivendoli
Monday, January 7th, 2008
Plinio had fallen in love with a statue, and it wasn’t even a pretty one. She, the statue, stood in what had been part of a small piazza but was now a funny, abrupt little alley where a warehouse and the back of a girl’s school touched roofs. She was in corner between the two buildings, where for hours after every rain, water drizzled onto her upraised forehead.
She was no historical figure, just an anonymous seller in the fish market, holding eels in one hand and looking up with an expression of wonder as though the sun had just come out after a storm. She was not a young woman, although she still looked young enough to bear children.
Plinio taught Latin at the girl’s school to girls who didn’t like Latin and weren’t good at it, and he had been driven nearly crazy seeing the statue at the end of the alley every morning and evening, often with old rainwater drizzling onto her face. So he had gotten in the habit of going to her before going home and standing there beside her for a while. It was peaceful to watch the shadows climb the rough gray walls of the warehouse, to listen to the distance-garbled laughter of the girls, sometimes to feel a gentle evening rain gradually weigh down his clothes.
The girl’s school closed during the war, but after a few decades it was thought a good idea to start it up again. The new school did not teach Latin, but did teach sex education, which the girls didn’t like any better.
Sometimes, when they were let out to play in the afternoons, a group of the girls would gather to sit and talk and chew gum by the statues in the little alley behind the school. The statues always made them think of romance, and boys, and how far apart those two things were. It wasn’t that the figures were beautiful, or that they were kissing or anything. It was just that the skinny gentleman was holding his book out over the eel woman’s head so that when it rained and water dripped down from the roofs, she was kept dry. And she, for her part, looked up at him with an expression of wonder.
One of the girls, Antonia, said she thought she was falling in love with him. The other girls laughed with embarrassment and delight.