The Minstrel of New York

 

By Joseph Luzzi

 

 

*

 

This year had been murder. On April 2 a man in Queens choked his son with a fistful of hard-boiled eggs. He was a high school math teacher and had been himself abused as a child. Later that spring in Rome an old woman jumped from a highway bridge into oncoming traffic. She was wearing a hat with plastic fruit and had just returned from church, having said a special prayer for God’s disenfranchised. Three days later, right before the solstice, the chief of police in a small midwestern state pumped a cartridge of bullets into a kindergarten class, the same morning his wife died from a stroke. He had served the force with distinction for twenty years and was president of a local Elks club.

Maybe it’s the stars, Marten thought, looking up into the Man­hattan dusk as the train nestled into the platform. He understood the big questions were dangerous enough for anyone, but for an angel there was nothing worse. “Keep your nose clean,” Matthew had always warned him, “watch what’s going on around you, and, whatever you do, stay the hell away from Allegory.” When his boss spoke in capitals, kneading the edges of concepts with his tongue just enough to force their first letters to rise, Marten took extra notice. Carefully draping his overcoat over his spindly legs, he settled into the car and waited for the rumbling to drown out the shrieks of the schoolgirls behind him. Their cackles caused the hair on his arm to stand on end. This morning he would tell Mat­thew just how he felt.

The express train rolled into Sutton Place where, after freezing the giggling schoolgirls with a lilt of his eyelids, he emerged into the cold drizzle. He quickly negotiated the cardboard porters of a residential tower, made his way down a hallway, and knocked on the last heavy oak door. A barrel-chested man in black eased the latch.

“Hello, Matthew.”

“Marten. What a surprise. Please, come in.”

The office he entered was decorated with cubist style drawings and sleek Asian plants. Matthew backed into his seat and took a sip of water.

“What can I do for you?” he asked.

“I won’t waste your time,” Marten answered. “I know you’ve heard the rumors.”

“I have heard some things, but I haven’t paid much attention to them. You know as well as I that, if anything, the last part of our time here is the toughest. Remember, you’re this close to finish­ing.”

“It’s not about finishing, Matt. Whether I’m at the beginning or the end doesn’t matter. I’m not doing anyone any good. Not you, not them out there. And certainly not me. I know I shouldn’t talk like this, but that’s what really bothers me. I’m becoming more and more like the ones I’m supposedly helping. The longer I stay, the less different I become.”

“Maybe we’re more like them than you think. Anyhow, it’s not for us to know how much. We have our work.”

“But I’m not working for anyone now.”

“You’re talking in circles, Mart—”

“Up until now I cherished my anonymity,” he interrupted. “It was what let me do my job, and it felt incredible to be able to walk down the street not only unnoticed, but unquestioned. Now all this weighs on me.”

“So where do we go from here?” his boss asked. Marten scanned his face for some sign of complicity. Matthew had always been there for him, but now he had his responsibilities, and in a way Marten would have been disappointed had he shied from them just because of friendship. Without saying a word, Matthew walked over to the window and stared into the cold. His lush curves effortlessly softened the sharp geometry of the drawings that framed him.

“Look,” his boss finally said, “things’ve changed a great deal. The pace now is incomparable to anything we’ve ever known. That’s exactly why we’re needed. I don’t know what else to say.”

His words stole Marten’s air and, in an instant, he knew he was being dismissed.

“Ok,” he said quietly, flicking dust from his lapel, “I under­stand. They’re all doing their best and so are you. I’ll do mine. Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s just a passing mood.”

“You’re doing the right thing,” Matthew answered, walking back to his desk. “It may not seem that way now, but you are.” He handed Marten a thick manila folder.

“I don’t get it,” he said, flipping through the pages.

“You will. This is someone only you can help.”

“How bad off can she be? She’s a magna cum laude from Brown, and her family loves her. That other stuff happened a long time ago. She was just a baby.”

“No drama in this one, Mart. That’s not what you need right now.”

“I’ll do what I can. But no promises after this one.”

“You’ve never needed to promise anything. Remember to go down to Euroboy on West 10th and buy yourself a couple of out­fits. Nothing too extravagant. And, please, don’t overdo the ac­cent.”

“What’s my name then?”

“Angel, of course. Angel Ramírez. Good-bye now.”

After kissing Matthew three times on the cheeks, Marten was out of the office and into the sleet, his bag clasped under his arms and the manila folder tucked inside his coat.

 

*

 

The new body was unlike any other. Tugging his arms inside the creases of a new leather jacket, Marten felt the crisp deltoids rub against his ribbed tee. Adjusting himself in his subway seat, his calves chafed against the denim. With his two large brown hands he could wrap the entire circumference of his waist. The sinews had become rubbery and the skin yellow, so Marten knew that this choirboy in gray was no young man. He couldn’t help but think that, for all the seeming power and agility, the frame would crumple like a dry leaf if someone pushed too hard. The fragile muscles felt like buds frozen in a shoot, tricked out of hid­ing by a spate of heat only then to die green in the inevitable frost. This is a beautiful, brown, barren field, Marten thought as the train made the platform at Union Square. He stood up and headed for the doors, on the way jostling a bag lady.

“Excuse me, Ma’am,” he called reflexively and then stopped in his tracks. His words soothed the stale, sour breaths. The woman stood up from her garbage and stared hard at the angular His­panic man before flinging him a smile.

Once outside Marten quickly navigated the book stalls and Bulgarian musicians and found the Mahatma, sculpted in the lower west corner of the square and bearing the extortion and ex­haustion on his shoulders like New York’s own Atlas. He held a long stem in one hand and a staff in the other. The rose looked at least a month old. Everyone knew where to find him, Marten was sure of it, where to come and rub for good luck. He burnished the staff with his gloves and replaced the dead flower with a fresh lily. Then he whispered something into its ear and kissed the brown forehead before disappearing into the traffic.

He followed the direction of the staff through University Place, past burgeoning NYU, and into the East Village. In Tompkins Square children kicked a red ball in between the tramps and pinched their noses when they got too close to their vomit-stained friends. That’s it, kids, grimace, Marten thought as he watched a circle of duck, duck, goose form around a man chugging Thun­derbird—stay up wind and wash when you get home.

On the eastern wing of the park stood Battersea Place, a prewar building under the aegis of Manolo Díaz. Marten knew from his dossier that this young man from Santo Domingo was the most conscientious janitor in the square. The walls of his building were free from graffiti, the rooms disinfected, and plumbing functional. He screened the police records of prospective tenants and refused to allow felons entry, no matter the measure of either the threat or the bribe. An immigrant who came to this country with a pendant of the Statue of Liberty sewn into his vest, he believed that in America if you work hard enough you’ll get ahead. Maybe he was right, Marten thought, for he had just bought a brand new Volkswagen Golf, leather perks and all, and even managed to send the odd fifty home to his parents at the end of each week.

Julietta Ortega, whose grandparents were also from Santo Do­mingo, heard about Manolo from the bike messenger she tried to flirt with at work, accepting his recommendations as she aimed her tee square at his muscular calves. The graceful janitor repre­sented everything she was running from; and she, everything he was heading toward. However intriguing her work and organic her diet, Julietta’s family had for generations swung mops no less chlorinated than Manolo’s. So she couldn’t help but be extra so­licitous with him, couldn’t avoid craning her head into cramps just to hear his small talk. Her third floor walkup overlooked the jun­gle gym and slides. She loved to watch the children play with the tramps, for she couldn’t relate to the couples mauling each other on the bench, nor to the groups of rockers daring one another to slip off the leather.

Once underneath Julietta’s apartment, Marten waited for her to pass by the window. He liked to see where his assignments lived before beginning a job. He waited patiently for an hour, almost two, still no Julietta. After a while, he stopped looking up and concentrated on reading over her file. After all, he thought, biog­raphy is love, the patience to stoop to details, even when this search slides into slander. After the sun had set and Marten’s legs had tired, a homeless man came over and asked him if he believed in God. Without answering, he smiled and walked to the apart­ment building across the square.

 

*

 

It was Sunday evening, and Julietta Ortega was returning from dinner. In Tompkins Square the rain slackened just as the strag­glers went in for the night. Taking advantage of the quiet, she set­tled into a bench. The stolid lines and iron rails before her were reminders that her city was and would always remain a factory, no matter the finery of its window dressings or the complexity of its sauces. The town houses lining the streets of Providence seemed all the more alien to her now for their sitting rooms and ancestry. All over Brown the monuments and the plaques an­nounced to her just how demanding the New England dead were in their final slumber, how much vigil they expected even as ash. With names like Benevolent, Hope, Charity, and Transit, the ave­nues pointed somewhere beyond the tarmac, up above the metal grid of the Rockefeller Library and the open glass elevator of the faded Biltmore. “Providence is dying,” the signposts whispered, “and someday you will need another map.” But you need peace and quiet to understand that sort of thing, she wanted to answer them back. A kind of peace and quiet you just didn’t find in Queens.

The horizontal and vertical axes of midtown and uptown Man­hattan taught her to avoid circularity in her thoughts. But here the downtown architecture was as irregular as its streets were laby­rinthine. Her work involved adding to the maze. She helped re­store abandoned warehouses and apartment buildings, converting them into artist studios or office space. She would have liked to build new things, to clear up the mess and start from scratch. But there was only so much space left in the city, and God wouldn’t be adding to it any time soon.

“Work with what you have, Julietta,” her mother always said to her. “Even if you have to repeat yourself.”

She pictured her mother at home above the laundry shop, the smell of disinfectant insinuated even into the loaves of fresh bread stocked in the cupboards. Maybe she was looking out onto the same moon now yawning over the iron roof tops. The black blan­ket of sky covering the moon reminded Julietta of a fairy tale her mother used to tell her.

“See, up in the sky, that round ball is the face of an Old Man. He is sad. More than you could ever believe.”

“Why, Mama?” she asked, clutching her mother’s leg in be­tween her stuffed giraffes.

“Because he lost someone.”

“Who? His best friend?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a girlfriend. Maybe even his own mother. Anyway, he just sits up there all night and doesn’t say a word.”

“Then how do you know he’s sad?”

“Look, guapa, at the stars. Those are his tears. On a clear night he fills up the whole world with them.”

Tonight there were no stars above her, but the moon seemed more pensive than ever. Julietta looked up into the face of the Old Man and thanked him for keeping those close to her alive. Her mother and brother were still in Queens, in the same home she grew up in, running the same business that had put her through college. Her father, whom she had never known, was also alive. Something about the stillness of the square, the absence of any wind, told her so. He had left just a few months after she was born. After she heard her bedtime stories, she would ask her mother why she didn’t have a big man in the house like all her friends did.

“Daddy’s in California now,” her mother would say, wrapping a quilt around Julietta’s skinny legs. “He had to leave for work. Something important.”

“Where’s California?” she persisted, but her mother wouldn’t answer. She would turn to the moon and watch it flick spangles of silver and crystal onto the tar of Astoria Boulevard. Julietta always missed her father most in December, when the black pavement beneath her feet was covered in puddles of ice and snow, so that the entire city resembled the face of the moon at night, a colander of all the crushed hopes and unfulfilled promises the year had ac­cumulated. All she knew about the man who made her was that he was a musician, and that her mother had met him in a club when she was nineteen.

“He was so handsome when he slicked his hair back. But still, no matter how hard he tried not to, he looked like a boy,” her mother told her. “The night we met he sung to me in Italian. I didn’t understand a word of it, but I knew right away that I’d do what he wanted.”

Julietta stared into the sky and without any sadness or joy tried to squeeze something from her eyes, anxious to give a star to the darkness. But she was unable to do it, because she couldn’t send a gift to someone she never knew, any more than she could still be­lieve a fairy tale she no longer thought was true.

 

*

 

Leaving Julietta’s window, Marten ambled into Ridgeway Ter­race and found the super, Richard Wilkes, sprawled behind a desk poking his stumpy fingers into a pretzel. Dick “Dutch” Wilkes was, according to his brief, one fat, worthless bastard. Why do I even care? Marten thought as he read over a profile he would have usually skipped. But a part of him knew that what he didn’t read now he perhaps never would. The chill in the air, the grey feeling he carried beneath his black leather, reminded him just how made up his mind had been before his meeting with Mat­thew. Read, he told himself, for he had no idea if they even both­ered with things like words and books in the place he was head­ing. He wondered if something like plot even mattered there.

“Excuse me,” Marten said, “I saw your ad for a third floor stu­dio. I’d like to take a look.”

As much light as could escape the squashed slits of Dutch’s eyes remained fixed upon the television. The Knicks were rallying, but his pupils were as lightless as a dead shark’s. Marten had dealt with his type before, in the open markets of Marrakech, in the trinket stalls of Bombay, even in the less savory appointments of Basle.

“Fat man,” he whispered, hunching over the TV.

Dutch looked up with a start. He was a fat man, but a proud man.

“What’d you call me?” he murmured, covering Marten in an exhale of jalapeno and curry.

“I said I need a room. Here’s the first month, a security deposit, and last month’s rent. Three thousand. I don’t need to look at it. I can imagine.”

 In the skittish twitter of Dutch’s eyes, cowardliness was the fa­vorite child of confrontation. He handed Marten a key.

“Here,” he muttered, shoveling the money into a drawer. “Any noise, any complaints, I call the cops, keep the deposit, and kick your ass. ¿Entiendes? It’s on the third floor, apartment 7E. Third door on your left.”

Marten gathered the key and scurried up the dusty stairs. The studio was actually quite spacious. Two large windows opened to the east, so he was sure to feel the morning sun blast, and the walls had just been painted white. Even the hardwood floors were less scarred than he had pictured. The apartment faced Julietta’s.

After pacing out the space, he emptied his bag and laid out his tools. First he arranged facial washes and scrubs onto the flat sur­face, followed by a helping of makeup and creams. After sorting the items, he stepped into the bathroom and drew the water. An­gel hadn’t seen his daughter in years, Marten thought, so he would look his best. His toilet ordered, he stripped off his clothes and settled into a white silk robe. He then sat down and dabbed his light brown skin with a sponge of facial cream before wrap­ping his hair in a warm towel. By the time his face was completely lathered in a green papaya wash, he noticed Julietta at the stair­well of her building. She saluted Manolo on her way up. He’s this country’s last hope, Marten thought, testing the mask for firmness. The smooth texture had now hardened into a brittle shield, and he could feel his pores starting to breathe. After a few minutes he removed the pre-shampoo wrap and headed for the bathroom, his silhouette hovering against the walls of the studio. He eased into the tub and felt the hot water grip his flesh.

The mask flaked at the slightest touch. He spooned water onto his eyes, then around the bulb of his broad nose. The crust was broken. Across the way, Julietta slipped into a pair of sweats. “Let’s get to work now, Angel,” Marten whispered as he spruced the remainder of lather from his face and watched his friend settle onto the bed with a magazine. He cleared his throat and opened his lips to the darkness, producing the same words Angel sang to Julietta’s mother twenty-five years ago in a parking lot beneath the Williamsburg Bridge, while a warm wind filled the city with the empty promise of Indian summer.

 

O Rosa mia, che bella fiera

Pasquale mio, che bella fiera

Guardiamo tutti questi gioielli

Guardiamo tutti, quanto son’ belli

 

The notes streaming from Marten’s mouth blended all his inde­cision, the crises of commitment and introspection, with his soak­ing body. He felt as though everyone he had ever worked with could hear him. He stared at his reflection and understood that the question wasn’t why he did or didn’t do his work, why he even bothered with people when they had no idea who he was. And why should they? he wondered, still enveloped in his own mel­ody, when after all I could be no more than an angel, with no home, no place to go, just someone on a mission of watching and waiting.

He looked across the alley to Julietta. Drawn like a marionette, she deposited herself at the window and searched the dimness of his bathroom. Before continuing, Marten sunk his head so low that all that she could make out was the gray and black mop of his hair.

 

Rosa e Pasquale son’ alla fiera

Cantano e ballano sotto le stelle

Quest’è una notte senza preghiera

 

He hid his eyes behind a sponge and scrubbed his flesh as he sang. She craned her neck to his every note. Marten knew that she couldn’t ever accept that her father left her, and that she wouldn’t forget the stories her mother told her. But he also knew that for the moment she was entirely his. She’s listening, Matthew, he thought as his pores drank in the steam. Julietta waited at the window sill for him to continue. She was in no hurry and neither was he.

 

*

 

Only after a few stanzas did Julietta realize that she was lis­tening to a language she didn’t understand. She had a few Italian compact discs stashed away in her collection, but she only listened to them when she was cleaning the apartment or reading the pa­per. It was all just pretty noise to her.

“When your father sang to me in Italian,” her mother once told her, “I just closed my eyes. Even after everything that happened between us, that kind of relaxation dies hard.”

Julietta shut her own eyes and pictured the face of the man across the way. The notes were a bit gravely, but otherwise the voice sounded like a young one. She was tempted to believe that the songs were for her, but then she craned her head out into the night, and what seemed like a million windows reflected off her eyes. So many could hear, she thought, so many must have their elbows propped up, just like her own, on the window sill in ex­pectation. She tried to make out the soaking figure through its shield of soap and water. She wanted to believe that she had come from the voice floating above the alley, but the night air was much too crisp for that kind of hazy thinking. He is just a singer, she de­cided, and she closed her eyes again and promised herself that she wouldn’t open them until tomorrow.

 

*

 

The next morning at 5:30 Marten sloshed out of the tub. Across the way Julietta slept, her face framed by the window sill. Her wavy brown hair was stuck in clumps to one side of her head, and her sweater smothered her lap in a white rush of cotton. The even pace of her breath kept him from waking her with his voice as the sun swelled behind her. He knew a great deal about her, but he didn’t know what she was thinking. Now that his work was done, it was better that way.

After sweeping the cosmetics into his bag, he slid out of the room, down the stairs, and into the reception, where Dutch slept mouth open in front of the television. Marten reached into his pocket and pulled out an envelope stuffed with crisp bills. He plopped it in front of the set along with his room keys and scrib­bled a quick note: “Had to leave unexpectedly. Sorry for the in­convenience. Something for your troubles—A.” There was just one more thing to do. Although it was only six o’clock, Manolo was sure to be working. After all it was Monday morning, Marten thought, and what you did today set the tone for the entire week. He entered his building and found him sweeping snow from the landing, whistling a tune from the night before.

“Hola,” Marten called with a wave of his hand.

“What can I do for you?” Manolo answered in a disciplined English dipped in the Colombian fritter houses of Jackson Heights.

“I’ve got a favor to ask you,” Marten said. “This is for Julietta Ortega. Please make sure she gets it.” He pulled the Mahatma’s dried red rose from his bag and stuck a note to its stem: “From your minstrel.”

“Sure thing,” Manolo said, cautiously cradling the gift in his arms. “And who are you?”

“Nobody special. Just a singer.”

After leaving the squeak and shine of Battersea all that was left for him was the statue, after which he would jump on an express train and then report to Matthew. The sun barely lit the streets. The vague look in Julietta’s face made him wonder if she even un­derstood why he had come or who he had been. If she hadn’t put two and two together, he imagined, it was partly his fault. How­ever much pride he took in his work, the dependency of someone like Julietta on his own expertise was just too much to bear. He quickly made it to Union Square and hurried to the statue, skip­ping over the homeless couple wrapped in a dying vine at its base. Propelling himself over the railing, Marten let his body fall against the trunk and wrapped his arms around the thin brown neck. Yesterday’s lily was still in bloom. Cradling the head of the Ma­hatma, Marten rested his legs against the metal barrier at the base of the statue.

“Where’s the real minstrel?” he whispered into the bronze ear. “I’ll bring him to Julietta. I just need to get my hands on him. Is he really in California?”

Without waiting for an answer, he relaxed his arms and slumped his hips against the staff. “You’re talking to statues, Marten,” he calmly told himself, “two days in a row now.” Re­leasing the Great One’s neck, he sought out his long hands. The lily suited him much better than the rose, Marten thought. No one should have ever given him something so dainty.

With one last surge he freed himself and made for the opening at the tip of the square. Instead of turning into the subway, he shot into Broadway and Fifth and moved toward the Flatiron Building and Madison Square. He needed to see the park. Matthew will understand, he assured himself, just this one last morning. With a swoop he merged with the uptown flow, anxious to drink in the human crush before making the patches of green. Soon, he thought, all the crusade and reform will be no more than the resi­due of some promise made in the past and forgotten, like a casual declaration between close friends or a night between strangers. The darkness was waning now, and Marten, he felt it every single space of his cold body, was recoiling from the breaking day. In what were maybe his last footsteps along the granite stones of Fifth Avenue, he felt that he hadn’t been so far from the truth all along.

“I get you now, Providence,” he whispered, as the crowds be­gan to thicken by the mouths of the subway entrances. “Now I see why you gave your streets those preposterous names.”

The sun was shining, but it gave no warmth, only a light so in­tense he had to shield his eyes from it. In the refracted glare he saw all of the moon’s invisible tears and remembered the sadness that Julietta’s mother tried to dress up for her daughter in fables, and it was no longer a burden. No, Mrs. Ortega, he thought, surging in the direction of the park, it’s not just a story, but you should never judge the pain on the face of the sky. Marten finally understood because he, too, was now spilling stars on the early morning sidewalk, and he, too, had lost someone. He had lost eve­ryone, from Julietta to her mother to Matthew to Dick Dutch Wilkes to Manolo Díaz to Angel Ramírez to even himself. He wasn’t going to make the park, but he was going to make it home, and he didn’t know what he was going to find in this new, re­markable, and, from all he had heard of it, majestically indifferent place. Invisible to the crowds hurrying to strap themselves inside the metal bellies of the subway, he buried his face into the leather folds of his jacket and spiraled up an avenue now bathed in cold sunlight.