The Long Vietnam of My Soul, Part 4

"Does the world really need another Spanish painter?" — Gerda Taro

Late May, 1989.

Harbinger or just another shimmering square on the calendar?

Basilio never figured it out but it sure seemed galactically ordained when Nieves landed on Macon Street the afternoon of his 30^th birthday.

He and Grandpop had waited by the rotary phone on the kitchen wall all day, waiting for her to call from the airport. Instead, she left a happy cabbie at the curb outside the house, a fat tip exchanged for info on the closest corner where a stranger could buy dope, the number of his pager scrawled across her left palm.

Had she asked him the same question, Basilio would have said, “Throw a rock …”

Before summer turned to fall, he’d be screaming in her face: “Why don’t you just run away and join the fucking circus?”

There would be blood in the street before that came to pass and he would bang his head against the telephone pole at the end of the alley when she took his advice.

In she swept, from vestibule to the heart of the house, dropping luggage along the way: a fearless matador in Joey Ramone jeans and boots of Spanish leather, eyes black as Greek olives and skin like a Scandinavian schoolgirl.

Nieves Boullosa Vega, a narcotic unto herself.

“Hola Tio! Hola primo!"

Nieves dumped her suitcase and backpack in the middle room, the spot where Grandpop slept on a cot, having abandoned his bedroom upstairs upon his wife’s death a dozen years before, a bedroom once smelling of death and Noxzema that would become Nieves’ that evening.

Good God, thought Basilio after she hugged him—kisses on both cheeks—and was now squeezing Grandpop with a verve that made the coiled fluorescent light above their heads flicker.

Good God in Heaven.

Nieves plopped down at the end of the red and white Formica table and Grandpop poured juice glasses of wine from the corked carafe that was a constant on the table.

Salud!

Basilio found himself drinking one glass after the other while Nieves sipped hers like a lady and spoke to Grandpop in Spanish.  

“How is your father?” the old man asked.

“He’s good, Tio … he’s good.”

[In fact, her father was heartsick and his ulcers began bleeding before Nieves’ plane left Madrid.]

Woozy, suddenly feeling himself the outsider and not liking it (which was nothing compared to what was coming, his discomfort a lollipop compared to what beckoned from pages on the calendar not yet turned), Basilio excused himself.

Upstairs, at the back window that looked across the alley to houses where other dramas played out between the stove and the sink, Basilio pressed his nose to the window screen and nursed his own opiates.

To himself: “Feliz cumpleanos, asshole …”