I’m listening to the sound of a horn from down on the street. Not a car’s horn but one of those old-fashioned bicycle air horns with the little rubber bubble you squeeze. Toot toot. I hear that horn and imagine the cart it’s attached to and I see a skinny mulatto pushing the shiny little hand painted wooden cart filled with homemade bread and sweet cakes up the cobblestone hill below my perch here in the hammock on my porch at the top of it all. Up and down. All day long. Toot toot.
The only time it stops is when he stops to transact a sale. In my mind’s eye I can see him stopping the cart before a crumbling one story pink colonial house with fading paint and weeds growing from cracks in the façade. A round woman who looks grey and disheveled but glowing with a weary life energy stands over the cart as he folds back the heavy clear plastic to accommodate her probing brown hand. I hear distant Carnaval drums pounding away like some strange machinery. She takes her stuff and he wraps it up. She pays him and he moves on, pushing his little cart up the hill some more. Toot toot.
Then the tooting horn is still again. Another sale I think as I lay here in the hammok looking out over the bay. I feel a pleasent breeze on my naked skin blowing all the way from Africa invisible out there over the infinite stretch of blue water that fades away to nothing. A big black seagull glides silently overhead. I can hear a motorcycle’s engine far off in the distance. I need to piss but I don’t want to get up from this hammock. I’m hungry and would like some fresh crab stew from the lunch counter down the hill… But I don’t wanna get up from the hammock.
A helicopter speeds by noisily overhead and I think of my mother laying in her grave. Another lazy day. Sunday. Day three of this long, senseless carnival of doomed souls. Somewhere a fire rages out of control. Somewhere a woman is crying. Somewhere people are smoking marijuana and laughing. I want to sleep and dream of elsewhere. But the horn is in my ear and I have to get up and piss. Toot toot toot toot.
As I stand pissing into the drain at the edge of my porch I hear voices singing across the way as Carnaval heats up for another day. The sun is hot on my torso. I guess I’ll go down the hill and get some food, take a motorcycle ride through another day on earth.
Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2009.
The descriptive quality of this piece (among the others) is cumulatively inspiring!