Chango's Fire (20 page)

“Those people,” she says, pointing outside, her words a bit slurred. “You were there. You saw all that.”

“Yeah,” I say, “so?”

“All that time, not a single cop car came by. What's wrong with this place, Julio?”

“That's why those women took it into their own hands,” I say, “Helen, this place is a place where you count on your friends more than the cops—”

“Oh shut up. You talk like you're the authority around here. You didn't know what was happening the other day. Maritza did.”

“Oh that's twice you said her name,” I say, upset that she cut me so coldly. “You guys are chummy-chummy now?”

“I like what she's doing, Julio. I like that she's actually doing things. I thought her church was a joke, but after the other day, I think I want to go and see her in the pulpit—”

“Let me tell you a little bit about your new idol. She doesn't believe in God, her church is all about her politics. She's so single-minded that she'll take advantage of you, me, anything, I mean that—”

“So what. I don't see it. And what about you?” Helen gets up and goes to get another drink. She stumbles a bit. Her walk is slightly unsteady. “Why don't you tell me about you. Since you seem to know everything.”

“All right, all right. I'm a criminal, Helen. I'm a criminal,” I say. Helen puts her glass down. “I'm into insurance fraud.”

“What do you mean?” Her eyes narrow in bewilderment, forming two parallel wrinkles just above her nose. “Like you sell insurance under a bogus company and if something happens you can't pay it, like that?”

“No, Helen, I set fires.” It comes out so natural, as if I am a bus driver, locksmith or doorman.

“Fires!” She pushes her drink aside, like she doesn't want to pick it up because she wants to hear it all without any alcohol in between.

“What do you mean, fires?”

“I've done things,” I say, putting my drink down as well, “I set fires not just for money but out of some sort of vengeance, an anger I have. When I was a kid, the property you are standing on top of was worthless. Many landlords burned their own buildings for the insurance.” Helen is listening intently, her face is expressionless and she's stopped blinking so much. “One day this photographer came to Spanish Harlem. She was a white woman, very friendly and nice. She began taking pictures of all the burned-out buildings and vacant lots. Blocks and blocks of burned buildings. I was with my father, who led me by the hand, and when we saw her taking pictures, my father said to her, ‘Take pictures of this place so the city can know what's happening here.' You know what she said,” Helen shakes her head, “she said, ‘The city knows, they even have a name for it, Planned Shrinkage.' And then she took a picture of me and my father and asked us for our address so she could mail the picture to us. Know what happened?”

“What,” she whispers.

“My mother was very religious, she still is, but back then we lived sandwiched between a Pentecostal church and a Jehovah's Witnesses Kingdom Hall. My mother believed that fire would never touch us, because we lived next to people who loved God and He would protect us. My mother believes that Spanish Harlem is a spiritual place, because it has more churches than hospitals or schools put together. So, before that nice woman could get her pictures developed, our building caught fire, and then the next building we moved into caught fire, and then the next. So she lost track of us.”

“Julio,” Helen places her hand on my thigh, so naturally, like she has known me for years.

“But wait, Helen. Years later, my friend Trompo, his father placed an ad in the paper.”

“For?”

“For someone to work in his coffee shop. It was legal work at first, but I knew what went on in that coffee shop. But I thought if the city can let those things happen and get away with it, then I can too. And soon I was offered a real job. I was lighting fires. You wanna hear a funny story?” I say, because I start feeling sad.

“Yes, tell me,” she tightens her grip, like she wants to switch conversational gears as well.

“When I was a little kid, Ronald Reagan came to Spanish Harlem.” Helen laughs. “No, I'm serious. Reagan was running for office and he stood on a mound of rubble surrounded by burned buildings and gave a small speech about how he was going to save El Barrio from all that arson and neglect.”

Helen laughs hysterically.

“What happened?” Helen is all teeth.

“People across the street started shouting, ‘We want Kennedy, we want Kennedy!' “

“Teddy? Are we that old now?” she says to herself and to me.

“I'm almost thirty,” I say.

“Same here,” she says and takes my hand and pulls me up from the couch.

“Let me show you my house.”

Her place is like her gallery. Paintings and artifacts from all over the world. There is a statue of Pavrati and another of Ganesha. She has paintings on her walls and African masks, along with rugs, from Latin America, I think. There are vases, and framed photographs, bookshelves, ivory elephants and carved plates. Helen's house is all artifacts and, except for a little boom box by the kitchen, no audio or visual appliances.

At times Helen picks up one of her artifacts, explaining them to me, telling when and in what part of the world she bought it.

“It's my planet,” she says, “and I'm going to see every inch of it before I die.”

There is a scent of Murphy Oil Soap in her living room, and it intensifies as she walks around her house. She has a little studio where, she says, she paints, badly but paints. I think she has more space than she needs or realizes, not being from New York City. But I need to stop making these assumptions about Helen.

So I ask.

“Space?” she says and then nothing else after that.

She shows me a framed poster in her hallway that has a little kid being potty-trained. Its caption reads, “Are you raising Bolsheviks?” She says she loves the poster, it can be taken either way, she says. It was a gift. I spot a bucket and mop standing by the corner, full of Murphy Oil Soap. Helen catches my eye. “If it's good enough for the church, it's good enough for your floors.” She recites that jingle we had heard sung many times in daytime commercials, when we stayed home from school and tried to avoid talk shows that crowded the channels.

Helen leads me to her bedroom, where she lights some candles. She excuses herself and leaves me alone there. Her bedroom window faces the Jefferson Projects and a few renovated tenements. There's a signed photo of the Dalai Lama hanging above her bed, where one would place a cross, if Catholic. She returns with the radio that was in the kitchen. She plays some music and lights another candle.

“You don't really,” she says as she strikes her next match to light another candle, “you don't really light fires, right?”

I don't say anything. But I did tell her facts about my life. Maybe she needs to hear less, because facts are tricky. I myself have never believed in facts completely. Like people, facts need other facts or they can't hold their centers. Facts need people to come together in a room and agree on something. That's the way they are born. Helen and I are gathered in this one room and now she wants us to come to an agreement on certain things. But I stay quiet. I'm not telling her the whole story. Which is what facts are supposed to show, the entire picture. I'm withholding from Helen the most crucial of all facts:

I'm burning your house.

“I believe you.” Her eyes have this glint, like it isn't the candles reflected in her eyes but her belief that by staying quiet I'm telling the truth. “I believe you, Julio.”

A
fterwards, I'm sure that Helen has become another fact in my life. Like my parents, like Trompo Loco, like Maritza, like Papelito, Helen is now so real. Is she an intruder in Spanish Harlem, is she not, it's all in the interpretation. Like who's on top? Or who's coming or going? It matters very little. The fact is, she's here. Right now. And I want her here, with me. Each time I'm with her, I feel like less of a stranger in her body, as if my mind and body stop rebelling. I enjoy discovering the constellations her moles form, the tiny wrinkles around her eyes, and what sounds escape from her lungs.

This time with Helen is like visiting a city that you love. Knowing you will never get lost. Feeling that you know exactly where you're going, the streets, the corners, the buildings, and the places where you're welcome. A city that you always want to come back to. From certain places, from certain angles, Helen feels familiar, her body is no longer so alien to me. Helen's body begins to naturally contain every architectural form I have ever seen in this city. I picture spiral tunnels constructed underground, as if the earth was Helen's ear. Subways I've listened to and taken all my life. Noisy inner tunnels, like circulatory systems that mimic both mine and Helen's respiration and exchange of breaths. Kissing her body, I picture double-helixed bridges, as if magnifying Helen's DNA. And aqueducts, where her sweat can channel through, rushing quickly, like her pulse. All these organic structures are replicated on the streets I have walked on all my life.

Realizations like this make me want to tell Helen everything. But telling Helen all could be an overdose of data, and then anything can happen. I might lose perspective and get lost. Become unbalanced. Forget that I have something to carry out, something I've been putting off. So I hold back and orient myself.

H
elen's laughing. She's happy and doesn't ask me anything. I let things stay quiet and let them happen as they may. Let the candles die, get up and get a drink, or begin all over again. I don't know or care what's going to happen.

I just like being here. In her bed. Doing nothing.

Helen then says that was great, and I leave it at that. But for some reason now, I want to know about her parents. I want to hear about her origins, her past, her town. She asks why? And I say, I just want to. In your letter they sounded interesting. She smiles and adjusts her weight, she leans her elbow on the bed as it holds her head up, like a buttress holding up the roof of a cathedral, and then Helen begins to tell me many things.

As
soon as I see him outside my classroom, pacing, waiting for the class to end, I know what he really is. He has fooled everyone, though he isn't dressed any different. His clothes are still wrinkled and old-looking. He has come to get me at school. He knows where it is and what time to be here. Cops don't do that unless you're in some serious trouble.

“Mr. Santana?” He calls out to me as the class ends.

“It's you,” I say with a confidence that is pure smoke and mirrors. I'm thinking, I'm done.

“Is there a place we can talk?” he asks, as other night school students rush by us, getting ready to head on to their next class.

“There's an empty classroom, right over there,” I say and lead Mario toward it. We enter and he closes the door, but he doesn't sit down. He remains standing.

“I won't take too much of your time. Sorry for not introducing myself.”

Mario's voice is unfamiliar, like he is two people. He extends his hand toward me. I shake it. He doesn't show me any identification, he doesn't have to, he would if I asked but there is no need to. He doesn't talk like a cop, but he is one.

“You work for Eddie Naglioni. He's being investigated for insurance fraud, sound familiar to you?”

I don't say anything.

“Well it should, because it was you who set those fires for Eddie, while he cleaned up. Made a killing. You bought a floor in a building on 103rd Street and Lexington. You paid a certain Felix Camillo, an owner of a religious store, to sign his name on the deeds, but it's your mortgage under someone else's name and you paid off some notary to backtrack the dates. All this to escape the IRS who would ask you how could you buy an apartment on your meager salary.” Mario doesn't need notes, he has me down right, and he recaps my life like he is reciting performance poetry.

“Mario,” I say, “if that's your name. I have a class. Just tell me what you want?”

“I'm sorry to disturb you.” I think he means it, too. “Let me get to the point.”

Outside, I can hear students waiting for this very room. So they can sleep till their next class.

“Listen, I don't really care about you. That's not what I'm after. I'm after your friend.”

The students knock on the door. Mario pays no mind to them.

“Eddie?” I say innocently. “I haven't seen that guy in a long time. You say I worked for him? Lots of people work for him, he owns the coffee shop.”

The students give up knocking.

“I don't know anything about Eddie,” I say.

He stares into my eyes again, he doesn't say anything. He knows I'm lying.

“Mr. Santana, you do no good to anyone in prison.” His eyes never leave mine. “I am willing to,” he pauses and clears his throat, “to look the other way on your errors.”

I hear a student outside recite her graduation speech.

We've placed in your hands our dreams and hopes because we trust your generosity.

We know we still have work to complete in defining ourselves and our mission in life.

“You will be on parole for a few years, but you will not serve any time if you become a source of information,” Mario says politely. Like asking me for a quarter.

“Listen I don't know anything about Eddie,” I repeat.

“Eddie? I'm after your friend.” Mario makes it clear, “You saw her earlier, I want your friend. Maritza Lisa Sanabria.”

“Wait, wait, wait, you want Maritza?” Mario doesn't want Eddie. He wants Maritza?

“Are you involved with this woman?” he asks me.

“Involved? You mean romantically.”