The Long Vietnam of My Soul, Part 5

“Feliz cumpleanos, asshole …”     

                  —Basilio, in the shaving mirror

Nieves had been on Macon Street for three days and spent all of her time at the kitchen table talking to Grandpop.

He asked about a vanished Spain remembered better than what happened the day before and she answered with stories he refused to believe.

“Mierda,” said Grandpop, no longer a Spaniard and never to be American. “Blasfemia.”

“No, no Tio. It’s true …”

The first morning she woke up in the city where the old man had landed in 1925, Nieves swallowed six aspirin and made him bacon and eggs: strips frying in a ragged circle, egg cracked in the middle, hot grease spooned over the yolk, making it blister and bubble.

Some 72 hours in which Basilio had not painted a stroke, the first stretch of wasted time since he’d moved in with Grandpop.

Thirty years and three days old and all of a sudden he can’t find his ass with both hands and a map.

Mother long dead and wife long gone; daughter and her basinet weekend visitors; getting high every night after Grandpop fell asleep and climbing to the third floor to cut a hole in the tar-paper roof with a butter knife; glimpses of a young mother across the alley—too goddamn cute to be a minute over 17— rolling him out to the launch pad just by walking a trash can to the end of the yard in yellow drugstore tenner shoes and no socks.

And now this.

A girl he’d never met who looked just like him, down to dark brown Beatles bangs cut along the curve of an olive brow, was talking gallego Spanish at the kitchen table to an otherwise cranky old man who everyday looked him dead in the eye and asked: “Why are you here?”

For this.

So this could happen.

                                                            -o-

The streets of Highlandtown were built on the rise of a hill that gave the neighborhood its name, the houses across the alley just a few degrees higher than Grandpop’s row as his stood a notch above the ones behind it.

As had become his habit, especially when brooding through moods the color of squid ink, Basilio stared out the window of the back room in hopes of seeing the girl across the alley.

[Some days were more plentiful than others. Some days he saw nothing and some days he only saw her husband—a young man with hair cut for commerce and a hatchet face—slamming doors.]

In the days before Nieves appeared, when Grandpop was dozing over the morning paper at the kitchen table or watering his tomatoes and peppers, Basilio spent entire afternoons waiting for a look at her.

They’d never spoken and he didn’t know her name. Rumor had it that the family was religious.

Less of a rumor—the old ladies in the neighborhood liked to talk and favored Basilio because they had known his grandmother—was that her husband was a jerk.

Imagine that, thought Basilio when Miss Helen was dishing the dirt over the fence, a lovely young woman has an asshole for a husband.

Today, however, was not a good day for long-suffering saint watching.

Up the stairway from the kitchen came hot debate over the nature of the “two Spains”—the Castilian Cain and a Moorish Abel bashing each other’s heads in with clubs, best illustrated by Goya in a cosmic street fight called “Duel With Cudgels.”

In 1970, the summer the “Long and Winding Road” became the Fabs last Number One at the far end of a miraculous tether, Grandpop and his wife and all of the Baltimore Boullosas traveled to Galicia to visit the village where the story began.

On their way back to the States, the family spent a few days in Madrid. In the gift shop of the Prado, Basilio’s father told the kids they could have a copy of any painting they wanted.

Basilio’s cousin Donna wanted a white stallion and his little brother chose a sentimental nativity scene. Already a crayon and charcoal prodigy at 12, Basilio brought home “Duel With Cudgels” over the objections of a mother who would only live a few years more.

He stapled it into the wall above his bed with the same force he now pressed his head against the windowsill.